State is responsible for us having fee-paying schools — it’s their plan

I WISH my son wasn’t at a fee-paying school.

“Take him out, then!” you cry. But it’s not as simple as that. In my son’s south Dublin community, fee-paying schools are the usual choice for boys, to the point that one of my friends, single and a student, has struggled to send her son to one of them.

The truth is that fee-paying schools have been part of the State’s school provision since its foundation. In the hoo-haa since junior minister Alan Kelly dropped his bombshell on The Week in Politics about the State reducing its subvention to fee-paying schools, this point has been missed: It is the State’s plan for certain children to go to fee-paying schools.