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

I congratulate Fr. Bartlett on his contribution. I would love to see traditional Catholic and Christian people in this country mobilised to respond to what he has described. We will respond, and we are responding. There are three kinds of Catholics on this island, certainly in this State: Catholics by conviction, Catholics by culture and Catholics by compulsion. The Catholics by compulsion are those people who feel they cannot get their children into the local school, or one of the seven Catholic schools in many of the towns around the country, unless they have that child baptised. It is institutional hypocrisy, which does nobody any good. Fr Bartlett and his colleagues control 90% of the primary schools in the Republic of Ireland in those towns where there is a demand – we have the patronage report – for diversity. It is not easy to persuade in terms of which of those six or seven schools will be transferred or that how can that happen. Progress on the pluralism and patronage report has been painfully slow at a time when our population numbers for primary school are growing and will not stop growing until 2028.

It requires leadership from the Irish Bishops' Conference. Change is always difficult and there has to be buy-in but there has been painfully slow change in this area. It would remove the necessity in many towns for people who feel the only way they can guarantee their child a place in a primary school is to go through the charade of having their child baptised. That must be a terrible insult to committed Catholics or Christians. That is what is happening. If that change could happen, it would be a very clear recognition that here on this island, in this State, there is a respect for pluralism which naturally translates into those areas where Christians are not just being discriminated against but are being murdered for their very beliefs and for historic beliefs they held in those communities long before St. Patrick came to this island.