Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There is a bit of a problem. How do we define what is maintaining the ethos of a school, or how does a school make the case it is necessary to discriminate to protect the ethos of the school? It is not clear to me whether it is clear in the legislation. I do not think it is from reading it. If a school is undersubscribed it is clearly and explicitly prohibited from discriminating. A school could say in a particular year that it has only ten Catholics because there are a lot of Muslem people and non-religious people so to maintain the proportion, as it would see it, of Catholic students it would start refusing people even though the school is not oversubscribed. It seems this would be allowed because the section does not explicitly state that if a school is not fully subscribed section 61(2)(b) does not apply. The Bill does not say that.