Archbishop: Cutbacks could wipe out Protestant schools

Protestant schools in the Republic could be entirely wiped out by devastating cutbacks, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin said today.

Dr John Neill also claimed the reclassification of the minority schools, which resulted in crucial grants and expenses being axed, was not being driven by financial concerns.

In an outspoken attack on education chiefs, Dr Neill said they were intent on punishing Protestant schools on an entirely wrong assumption that all pupils are from wealthy families.

“It is my distinct impression that the reclassification of the Protestant schools was not driven by financial considerations,” he said.

“It was driven by what amounts to a very determined and doctrinaire effort within the Department of Education to strike at a sector which some officials totally failed to understand.”

Protestant secondary schools – apart from the State’s five Protestant comprehensives – were removed from the free education scheme, after more than 40 years, last year.

Under the move, ancillary grants considered critical to their survival – such as caretaker and secretarial expenses – were ended.

Fee-paying Protestant schools have also faced an increase in the pupil teacher ratio to 20 pupils to one teacher, compared to 19 to one in other secondary schools.

Dr Neill, the most senior Anglican in the Republic, said the reclassification of schools “will in the end put some, if not all of them, out of business.”

He added: “Those that survive will only do so by charging excessive fees, thereby excluding the very community they were founded to serve.”

The Archbishop insisted the affected schools were not elitist and that many Protestant parents were “very poor, and I mean very poor indeed, who sacrifice much in order to send their children to a school of their own tradition.”

During his Presidential address to the Dublin and Glendalough Diocesan Synod, Dr Neill said he was not asking for Protestant schools to be spared cutbacks, which are hitting everybody.

But he demanded Education Minister Batt O’Keeffe recognise the scale of poorer families that are being unfairly targeted by the measures.

“The Protestant community in Ireland is very mixed, ranging right across the sociological spectrum, and of course in terms of income,” he said.

“This attempt by the minister to place all Protestants into a category of privilege – suggesting that they have chosen private education – is manifestly unjust.”