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Protestant schools in the Republic
The Minister for Education, Batt O’Keeffe, has been (rightly) accused of undermining the constitutional right of Protestants to send their children to a school that caters for their faith.
I would like to highlight the fact that there are already a considerable number of Protestant parents who do not have the choice to send their children to a school with an ethos of their choosing, namely, those of us who have children with disabilities. I do not mean those whose needs are such that they need to attend special schools; rather, I refer to those who are eligible for extra support within a mainstream setting.
All schools are obliged to accept children with special needs. However, in practice, many refuse to do so. Our local parish school turned away our son when he was four because of his diagnosis. We were forced to turn to a nearby Roman Catholic school which welcomes children of all backgrounds and abilities. Although the school had two special needs classes, our son stayed in a mainstream class throughout his eight years there.
Despite the fact that there were three Protestant secondary schools within a three-mile radius of our home, we found ourselves in the position of having to enrol him in the local community school. He is now happily settled in the top stream, where he has a half-time special needs assistant and receives five hours’ resource support each week. The Department of Education would have funded this no matter which school he attended.
It certainly wasn’t the school of our choice but, thankfully, the school has a strongly inclusive ethos. I know of other Protestant parents of children with disabilities (both physical and intellectual) who have been/are going through the same trauma we did. It is extremely upsetting to be turned away from the schools of your choice and forced to look elsewhere.
Surely the time has come for Protestant schools to face up to their responsibilities and obligations when it comes to serving the needs of all of their young people?
Fiona Murdoch
18 Hermitage Downs
Grange Road
Dublin 16
I am disappointed that the Revd Dr Gordon Graham has not experienced Protestant ethos within education (Letters, 16th October). That said, I find it incomprehensible that a member of the Church of Ireland clergy questions the ability of a Protestant-ethos school, established in 1570 as the Diocesan School for Clogher, to be denominational without being sectarian or politically incorrect.
As principal of the school mentioned in Dr Graham’s letter, I must state in defence of my school that it does characterize the Protestant ethos and those who work and study within its portals are neither politically incorrect nor sectarian.
For many Protestants living in the Republic of Ireland, Dr Graham’s statement, "Once again, I am puzzled by the recurring phrase ‘Protestant ethos’ in what seems on the face of it just another grab on the public purse ...", is deeply hurtful. The situation in which Protestant-ethos schools within the Republic find themselves is a much more serious plight than Dr Graham appreciates.
Monaghan Collegiate School parents, teachers and Board are willing to answer Minister Lenihan’s exhortation to patriotic duty and make our equal contribution to sacrifice like everyone else. However, Protestant post-primary schools in the Republic have received reductions in their funding, such as the removal of support grants for secretarial and care-taking provision, and increased pupil/teacher ratio from 1:18 to 1:20, such as schools in the Vocational Education and the Catholic Voluntary Sector have not.
The Department of Finance, in the recentlypublished McCarthy report, proposes that the pupil/ teacher ratio for Monaghan Collegiate School will be increased to 1:38 as part of a 50% reduction of State funding. It should be noted by Dr Graham that, prior to the 2009 Budget, the Protestant Sector received the same capitation funding for each pupil attending a Protestant school, indeed slightly less per pupil, than the Catholic Voluntary Sector.
Add to this the proposal to close the Church of Ireland College of Education and a very frightening picture of cut-backs directed towards a minority emerges.
The reality for a Protestant family living in Co. Monaghan is that it no longer has the choice to send it’s children to a Protestant-ethos school supported by the State’s Free Education System, as the government has removed Monaghan Collegiate School from this.
Michael Hall
Principal
Monaghan Collegiate School
Corlatt
Monaghan
Co. Monaghan
Christopher Kirk (Letters, 30th October), having at some time or other been inconvenienced by the closure of border roads for security purposes, gives readers a not unfamiliar rant about Northern Ireland and those who would speak of its dead and injured.
More interestingly, he objects to what Gordon Graham (Letters, 16th October) appears to be playfully bemused by - the term ‘Protestant ethos’ applied to some schools in the Irish Republic.
I think I am correct in saying the term ‘Protestant’ in this context is a carry-over from the earlier Ireland of ‘Protestant, Catholic, Dissenter’. The terms ‘Protestant’ and ‘Church’ were interchangeably used in designating those of the Church of Ireland (England). The term ‘Protestant’ is now used of those Western Churches that do not accept the supremacy of the Roman Church over all the Churches. ‘Dissenter’ then referred for the most part to Presbyterians, known elsewhere on the European continent as the Reformed Church. The term ‘Catholic’ had come to refer to those who, in the eruption that took place in attempting to reform the Western Church and society, upheld papalism as the norm in ordering Church and State.
Originally, the term ‘Catholic’, by an edict of the Emperor Theodosius I, was authorised to be assumed only by those who held to the belief in the "one deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" as the universal belief of Christianity, that being the belief then "professed by the Pontiff Damasus and by Peter, Bishop of Alexandria". Those who held otherwise were deemed heretics and were forbidden to call their Churches, ‘Churches’.
Earlier, the belief in the deity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit was decreed at the Council of Nicaea summoned by the Emperor Constantine and presided over by him for the purpose of clarifying Christian belief. It is recited Sunday by Sunday in most Churches, Western and Eastern. Maybe, some day, we shall have schools that teach all this, and other matters, and we might then call them schools permeated by the ethos of Christian culture in which all can feel at home.
Wm A. Miller
150 West Circular Road
Belfast
BT13 3QJ
Dr John Kyle has taken issue with my criticism of his recent participation in a service at the invitation of the Bishop of Down and Dromore (Letters, 30th October).
I note that Dr Kyle does not deny certain points raised in my letter, e.g. that the Progressive Unionist Party, to which he belongs, and the UVF are linked or that the UVF is a terrorist organisation which is still in existence. It is as well that he does not deny these propositions, as they are not merely propositions but facts - indisputable and inconvenient facts.
Instead, he chooses to tell us that so-called "loyalist paramilitaries" played a prominent role in the peace process. I fear that it has not occurred to Dr Kyle that there would have been no need for any peace process if terrorists, such as the UVF with which he is linked politically, had not resorted to violence; and I need hardly remind him that the vast majority of innocent deaths over the last 40 years were the work of terrorists; more than 400 of them are to be attributed to the UVF alone.
Dr Kyle’s fine words about the creation of "a just and equal society underpinned by a sustainable peace process" and "a message of individual and community transformation" will be found most moving by any readers of The Church of Ireland Gazette who are unaware that the UVF has not yet decommissioned its weapons; that many of its crimes (the Dublin and Monaghan bombings most notably) remain unsolved; and that its members are still involved in crime and in terrorising ordinary Protestants.
Dr Kyle is mistaken if he supposes that all of us have confused reconciliation and amnesia.
Alexander Hilton
36 Knockbreda Road
Belfast
BT8 5LH
Canon John Bartlett (Letters, 25th October) says, with reference to Edward Vaughan’s article two weeks earlier, "God save us from a Church which takes heresy so seriously that it persecutes individual Christians for daring to think and to think differently." God save us indeed - this phenomenon is endemic across the Atlantic and could come to us.
But the canon sees the danger as coming from the other end of the theological spectrum - are people to be "condemned eternally" for erroneous belief in matters such as Christology or ministry?
By happy coincidence, Mr Vaughan’s continuation article in the same issue makes clear that this is not his position. The issue is not of "getting a formula wrong in a maths exam" but rather of "wilful disobedience" and leading people astray from God’s revelation.
As long ago as September 1994, the Gazette printed a sermon in which Canon Bartlett defended the Revd Anthony Freeman, an English clergyman who taught that "God is not a Supernatural Being but a human projection" (the canon’s description). I asked in response how such a person could with integrity teach his flock to say: "Our Father".
Mr Freeman’s bishop followed the principle of Titus 1: 9, "hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught ... and refute those who oppose it", and revoked his licence. This was discipline, not persecution - Freeman is still even listed in Crockford’s.
It does not help to refer to necessary Church discipline as persecution. If Canon Bartlett had been a leader in the New Testament Church, would he have cautioned against "persecution" of the circumcision group (Titus 1: 10) and, if so, would the Gospel ever have come to Ireland?
Dermot O’Callaghan
27 Monument Road
Hillsborough
Co. Down
BT26 6HT