Mr. Paul Rowe:

In answer to the first question, Educate Together has never had an agenda against Catholic education or the right of parents to access Catholic education. The problem is a situation where parents have no choice but to send their children to Catholic schools and this, universally, across the developed world, is recognised as a human rights violation. Nothing in my comments should be interpreted in any way as criticism of best practice in Catholic education or criticism of Catholic education in its own right whatsoever.

In answer to the second question, from Senator Paul Coghlan, the statistics that I quoted are from the Department and Education and Skills survey of parental preferences in the Killarney area and they are representative of that. I can speak from personal experience that Educate Together has had groups of parents in the Killarney and Kerry area seeking Educate Together places for their children for many years and they represent consistently the fact that there is no choice and no opportunity for an alternative. I stress that diversity, space for innovation, space for a change and space for independent initiative in the education system is a valuable attribute of any well developed education system. A situation where the State continues to ignore fundamental violations of human, religious and intellectual rights in significant areas of the country is something which we as a society must address, and addressing this human rights issue is to the benefit of all, not least to the future vitality and health of denominational education in the country.

To Senator Bacik's question as to what specifically needs to be done, we need to share with the Senators what really is the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue in Irish primary education is the ownership of the real estate and the fact that 98% of the primary schools are privately owned. The legal lien over property which the Department of Education and Skills should have is extremely weak despite the fact that in most cases the State has provided 85% of the building cost of infrastructure and over many years it has provided well over 90% of the running costs of all schools.

There is an issue here that must be addressed relating to the legal lien of a property and what rights the State has over its very high investment in that property over many years on behalf of the public.

On the fourth question, from Senator Zappone, Educate Together does not have a view that having an independent complaints mechanism in this area necessarily would move things forward. Our view is that this is a Government programme and we recognise that in its programme for Government, the current Government has finally recognised this issue after many years of it being raised with the United Nations by organisations such as Educate Together. We first brought this issue to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination ten years ago. However, the current Administration has recognised this issue, it is in its programme for Government and we would like to credit the work of the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector. The fundamental problem with it is this is a Government programme with no resources. For example, the reform programme for the water supply industry has a significant investment of State funds in order to implement it. Unfortunately, the reassignment of patronage programme does not have a resource allocation towards it and the work done by independent bodies such as Educate Together or others is not resourced. We must do this entirely on the basis of fund-raising or voluntary and community-raised resources and that limits its effectiveness and its impact.