Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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28. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills the work which needs to be carried out before he is ready to finalise a legislative proposal regarding the role of religion in school admissions. [31747/17]

Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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As the Deputy will be aware, earlier this year, I ran a public consultation process on the role of denominational religion in the school admission process and possible approaches for making changes, to which I received almost 1,000 submissions.

On Monday 29 May 2017 I held a public Forum on the role of religion in primary school admissions, which was attended by over 120 individuals.

Under the Education (Admission to Schools) Bill, which last week passed committee stage, schools which are not oversubscribed will have to accept all applicants. This means that religion will not be used in admissions to 80% of schools, and in fact this is already the practice in most schools.

It is in the 20% other schools that this issue now needs to be addressed. My preference is to remove the capacity for state-funded denominational primary schools, where they are oversubscribed, to use religion as a criteria in admissions process except, in three scenarios:

- where it would not otherwise be possible to maintain the ethos of the school;

- where the school is established by a minority religion, in order to ensure that students of that religion can find a school place in a school of that ethos;

- where the school is established by a minority religion, in order to admit a student of that religion who resides in a community consistently served by that school.

As I have said recently, my intention is to introduce more detailed proposals on this in the autumn, with a view to having them enacted by the end of 2017, depending on the process in the Oireachtas.