Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Since we are on the topic of divestment of schools, we are having quite a difficult experience in Ballyfermot with the divestment and amalgamation of schools. There needs to be more forward planning about how we carry it through. When you talk to parents, the vast majority of them say they are for non-ethos based education. Schools often carry out surveys to see how the parents will respond. The surveys are online and, like most surveys, they get a very low respondent rate. The respondents they do get tend to state, "I want my kids to grow up in a Catholic school". This is because the respondents tend to be those who are positive about the status quo. We therefore need to find a different tool to ascertain how the population in general feels about non-ethos based education. My own view for a long time and that of People Before Profit-Solidarity is in our Bill which is sitting in the waiting room for a long time for the Government to bring in a non-ethos based sex education and consent programme and that would allow for divestment to happen much more freely. It would mean that if parents want their children to have religious education, then they can send them to a religious class, but otherwise, the school would be non-religious. That is the easiest way to proceed. If you are Muslim and you want your kids to have a Muslim education, they can go to a Muslim class, and likewise if you are a Catholic. We need to think about this much more clearly and be much more proactive as a State in saying it will happen in the lifetime of this Government. I hope this will be the case, however short or long that lifetime will be.

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