Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I call on the Minister to be a little bit braver than he has shown himself to be. There is no doubt that for most teachers, parents and students, singling one child or a number of children out for removal from a general classroom at particular times of the day is not appropriate. While that it may not affect many children, there is no doubt that children very often feel that kind of separation very deeply. It marks them out as being the other.

In Dublin West, as well as in many areas of Dublin Bay North, most of our schools have between 30 and 40 different nationalities. Some schools have up to 80 different nationalities. It is almost certainly the case that within that cohort there are wide variations of religious beliefs, ethnic backgrounds and parents who have come from different parts of the world. The population statistics in the last census are very striking. I am not sure whether the Minister has taken that into account in the Bill.

Some 30% of the population in Dublin West were not born in Ireland and-or their parents were not born in Ireland. For different reasons, different groups of people from different countries and backgrounds have settled in small towns around the country. The statistics show that Ireland has changed utterly over the past 25 years in terms of the diversity of its population. It is very bad educational practice to pick some children out and tell them to go to the back of a room, the principal's office or elsewhere. Children are being segregated from the group.

There is a very strong precedence for this in Irish education, as the Minister will know if he has read any of the works by various people on the history of education and its relationship to institutions. Around Ireland, there was a widespread practice whereby children from institutions, such as a local orphanage, were made to sit in a group in a special place in the classroom so that they were marked off from the other children. That is part of our legacy from a hidden Ireland. People were in no doubt that those children were to be regarded as different socially and, in some cases, to be effectively shunned. I am not suggesting that is the intention of the Minister, but he is following in the tradition of enormous insensitivity to children's experiences.

There is an emerging consensus. A distinguished educationalist, Professor Kathleen Lynch, has written extensively about this issue. For the past 30 or 40 years, she has been an adviser to Educate Together and has set out the curriculum around ethical, humanist and social values and understanding the world of the family, neighbourhood, town, country, region, world and the great religions of the world.

A lot of work has been done in the area. In fairness to many of the major faiths, their religious curricula also reflect a wider appreciation that we live in a diverse and globalised world and, therefore, different religions are globalised. The numbers may vary from place to place. The Minister needs to think this through and not go for a convenient and tidy solution. He also needs to bear in mind that young teachers coming to work in places like Dublin West are keen to be positive and make every child welcome. Boards of management are the same. It may take time, but we need to recognise what has happened and what parents want.

I frequently meet parents, as I am sure the Minister does, who are very distressed if their child is picked out and sent elsewhere. The Minister might say that if the parents knew a child was going to particular school that was of one or another denomination, what should they expect? They expect their precious child to be treated as equal to everybody else. That may surprise the Minister and people in the Department of Education and Skills, but the world has changed.

As I said, there are very distinguished people in the world of education who have written extensively about this issue. We have a lot of documentation on teachers' experiences and their unhappiness with being forced to segregate children on particular occasions. School principals go to enormous lengths to try to mitigate the negative impact of these differences.

I strongly suggest to the Minister that he rethink the proposal and offer his support. The language of the recent Fine Gael leadership contest suggested a strong respect for diversity. That is not evident in the Bill. It is very narrow and obscurantist. It harks back to an older Ireland.

We need to bear in mind that we have a significant population of young children in areas of growth. There is enormous diversity, which is confirmed by the census figures. That has been the case since about 2000 when very large numbers of new people came to live in Ireland within a relatively short period of time, and they now comprise a significant proportion of our population.