Ruairi Quinn (Dublin South East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I have regarded the situation in that way so far. We have not changed the ratio at primary or second level because it is part and parcel of front-line services. Frankly, what we aspire to do and what we must do are two different matters.

The history of this should be understood.It dates back to 1907 with the Ne Temere decree, which the Vatican imposed on this country but not on Germany, for example, which had a mixed population of Catholic and Protestants. Under the decree, a person of the reformed Protestant faith who married a Catholic needed to give an undertaking that he or she would have all of his or her children reared in the Catholic religion. Prior to that, culture and custom were that the children of a marriage followed the religion of their parents – daughters followed mothers and sons followed fathers.

When the free schemes were introduced by Donogh O’Malley in the mid-1960s, they recognised that many people in the reformed Protestant faith felt that, given the numbers, the Ne Temere decree was a form of forced conversion and that they would lose their families. They wanted their children to be able to socialise and be educated with other members of the reformed church tradition. Given the low density of numbers across the country, boarding schools became necessary to facilitate this desire.

The Department and the Ministers of the time set up a block grant for the reformed church, called the Secondary Education Committee, SEC, of €6.5 million currently, which is given to the Protestant community to provide for fees for Protestants who cannot afford the schools’ fees. The community administers it.

Some have repeatedly asserted to me that there is an animus against the Protestant church on the part of the Government, but that is not the case. There is a legal opinion to the effect that we cannot knowingly subsidise one religion over another. It is prohibited by the Constitution. We have within the SEC a mechanism through which we can address the issue of access, as it is a right of a parent to send his or her child to a school of his or her choosing, all other factors being equal. The role of parents as the primary educators is recognised in the Constitution. There is no animus against Protestant schools, even though that has been articulated by some.