'Catholicism is so much part of the upholstery that it's almost invisible -- until you try to find a school for your child or wonder if you can use stem cells to help cure a loved one'
Saturday May 30 2009
Evelyn McDaid's face was wrecked on Sunday when she tried to save her husband Kevin. Kevin was savaged by a horde of Glasgow Rangers supporters on the rampage after the team beat Glasgow Celtic to the Scottish Premier League title. He died.
Kevin (49) was a community worker and peace activist who'd spent over a decade trying to make Northern Ireland a less sectarian place. He happened to be a Catholic, which instantly made him the enemy -- if you're bigoted, bestial and on the 'other' side.
There's always the 'other' side, when life is black or white. The day before Kevin was murdered, Bertie Ahern accused various critics of being 'anti-Catholic'. Their alleged sectarian offence was to question the wisdom/fairness of the indemnity deal done with CORI by Michael Woods and himself, which costs the State a fortune.
Ahern's riposte said more than he intended. For if those who oppose his action are 'anti-Catholic', then those who support it must be 'pro-Catholic'. He and Woods must be 'pro-Catholic', which means they acted from a sectarian position, although they were Taoiseach and Education Minister. It suggests they value the wealth and security of religious orders above the welfare of survivors and, indeed, the best interests of the State.
You could let Ahern off the hook by claiming he was only deflecting criticism, didn't mean it, isn't sectarian. Sure, hasn't he had a laugh with Ian Paisley near the Boyne? Didn't he mark his forehead with ashes on the first day of Lent while encouraging multicultural migrant workers to join the labour force? And he never divorced.
The Ahern years saw a sea change in attitudes to religious practice and sectarianism. Every traditional measure of Catholicism showed dramatic shifts, whether in falling Mass attendances or in willingness to obey religious teaching on, say, contraception or divorce.
Mass attendances dropped most drastically in the Celtic Tiger's early years and kept falling. You couldn't blame it on lazy, greedy Sunday shoppers either, because the last time the Catholic middle classes grew wealthier (over a century before), exactly the opposite happened.
They endowed churches and religious orders, and flocked in their finery to the new churches. Some were daily communicants. Many embraced Catholicism as part of their Irish identity.
You can't claim that Catholicism was as intimate a part of Irish identity for the early Celtic Tigers. Yet the sectarian ethos remained underneath, in surprisingly widespread ways.
Under Ahern, no change was made to any of the structural relationships between the State and Catholicism. It was and is the dominant controlling interest throughout education, health and many social services.
It's so much part of the upholstery that it's almost invisible -- until you try to find a school for your child or wonder if you can use stem cells to help cure a loved one of some debilitating disease.
Take education, which remains overwhelmingly denominational in the State sector, as well as privately. By 2004, some 55pc of Irish people said they wanted inter-denominational or non-denominational schooling, when asked by the Education Research Centre. Yet 92pc of schools were controlled by Catholic religious orders.
Four years later, the Department of Education's audit of enrolment policies led to a survey where 61pc of Irish people said that education shouldn't be denominational, with only 25.7pc disagreeing. Almost half went on to say that religious education should happen after school, not during school hours. This was slightly more than the 50+pc opposed to denominational education when the Catholic Bishops Conference commissioned their own survey.
It's curious how religious orders and Church officials have responded to the drop in demand, which happened alongside the almost total wipe-out of vocations, meaning there aren't enough clergy to work there anyway.
The Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter about it this time last year, where they noted that Ireland has more Catholic schools than it needs. But it had mixed messages. On the one hand, Bishop Leo O'Reilly said that providing different types of school was a matter for the Department of Education. However, the Bishops didn't address the core question of whether the Catholic Church would control the schools or hand its interests over to the State.
The evidence is that no matter how unsupported a congregation, it will retain control -- and keep its schools Catholic. The Christian Brothers set up the Edmund Rice Schools Trust to manage many of its schools but the charter specifies they must remain Catholic and controls everything from who is appointed a trustee, to how subjects are taught, to who will be given a teaching position -- or not.
When Ahern was Finance Minister, the Fianna Fail government inserted a protocol within Europe that exempts Irish Catholic schools from the fair employment requirements mandated elsewhere. So if you're not Catholic, or somehow viewed as a lesser Catholic (because you're divorced, gay, like to speak your mind occasionally) the school can choose a less qualified candidate who is a better Catholic or terminate your employment if your anti-Damascus conversion happened after you got a job.
This is public-sector practice, funded by taxation.
Is it unreasonable to wonder why taxes should pay for an ethos that could exclude present-day children and their children from getting employment in the State sector? Or might the Irish education sector remain way more sectarian than we thought.
- Medb Ruane
