Mr. Seamus Mulconry:

My name is Seamus Mulconry and I am the general secretary of the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association. I am joined today by my colleague, Ms Miriam McCabe, one of our education advisers and a principal with 24 years teaching experience, 15 of those as the principal of a school in Oldcastle, County Meath. We are the support organisation for over 2,800 schools and almost 23,000 members of boards of management. We provide advice to schools on a wide range of issues, ranging from admissions to HR, finance, parental complaints, bullying and the myriad of other issues faced by schools. We also provide training to boards of management and last year held 33 training sessions. We represent boards in discussions with the Department of Education and Skills and other stakeholders.

There are three fundamental points I would like to make about the legislation before us. We have been invited here to comment on the Equal Status (Admissions to Schools) Bill 2016. The first fundamental point I want to make on this issue is that no Catholic school wishes to exclude any child from the benefits of a Catholic education. In almost 95% of our schools, we take everyone who applies. Our schools are welcoming and diverse, dedicated to the full development of the child and not to indoctrination. The school that my child attends is a pretty good example. It basically reflects the geographical area in which it is situated. It takes everyone and all comers.

The second point is that the difficulties schools, parents and pupils face are really about resources and not religion. There is a growing issue of oversubscription found mainly in the Dublin area and the commuter belt, such as Meath and Kildare, but that sometimes flares up in other locations. We have been looking at this issue for a while. Last year, we identified about 21 schools in the greater Dublin area in which there were problems with oversubscription. This year we have identified 42. In 17 of those schools, there was an issue with baptism. That equates to about 1.2% of rejected applications. I will give the committee the figures. There were approximately 26,968 applications to Catholic primary schools that completed a survey for us. Of these, 19,218 were successful. Of the remainder, only 1.2% were unsuccessful due to an issue with a baptismal cert. The key point I am making is that this issue is really about a lack of school places in some geographical locations. The Bill before us is an admissions Bill. It will not add one school place. It will not solve the problem. The fundamental issue I would point out is resources. We need to investigate what is really going on in terms of oversubscription. We need to identify where extra school places are needed and put them in as a matter of urgency.

The Bill itself is a little bit unclear. It does not define the catchment area, which is core to what the Bill is about, nor does it define how a school can prove that it has taken in sufficient numbers of its own denomination to prove that it has satisfied local need. These are two big areas. We have a real concern that if the Bill goes through, it will not solve the problems we are facing but could create a field day for lawyers who would have a merry time trying to figure out loopholes and could pit schools against each other. If schools are allowed to define their catchment areas, there is nothing to say that catchment areas could not overlap. For this reason, we believe the Bill is premature and we urge the committee to investigate what is going on with oversubscription in the greater Dublin area.