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

I accept a number of positive points made by the Government and other Deputies who will not support this amendment, but I will press it because that is the right thing to do. The fudge that the Government has devised does not address the current system's fundamental unfairness vis-à-vischildren. My obligation is to propose what I believe is in the best interests of children, and no matter how one construes it, I cannot see how it is the job of the State to promote particular religious views, make people who do not necessarily share those views feel different, segregated and under pressure, and impose same on them.

I accept Deputy Michael Collins's point that there are many people in denominational schools who would never want to discriminate and would want to accommodate, but the problem is that there is no protection against a situation where that is not the case. If the decision on how to accommodate people is left up to the school, maybe it will accommodate them well and maybe it will not. We get ourselves into a knot when we have schools that are informed and dominated by a particular religious view. Deputy Thomas Byrne rightly pointed to the rather unseemly scramble around patronage, where there are competitions like in football.

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