Teaching religion in schools - We are at an important crossroads

Two predictable events suggested this week that by choosing not to acknowledge that this society has changed utterly, we seem set on ensuring that an avoidable and destructive conflict becomes an inevitable one. Both events focussed on the place of religion in education and highlighted deeply-held but conflicting beliefs around this issue. Both events highlighted the complexity involved and suggested that as society becomes more diverse, this problem will become even more fraught.

One was the admission by Jan O’Sullivan, the education minister, that only two schools — and one was a Church of Ireland school — have had a change of patronage despite the fact that this evolution has been a Government policy objective for more than three years.

In the face of this snail’s pace change, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that, just like unbending civil servants prepared to out-wait a demanding but transient minister, some of those who hope to protect Catholic Church’s dominance in our primary schools’ system have been less than co-operative. Catholic patrons control around 90% of our primary schools and a teacher is very unlikely to be employed at one unless they have completed a course in religious education sanctioned by the Catholic Church. This dominance may have reflected society once, though even that is open to question, but it certainly does not now and it needs to be changed. Trying to oppose that change will, ironically, make it more inevitable. It seems it is time for the Government to be more forceful on this issue.