If You Ask Me
by Malachi O'Doherty

The Jesuits used to say that they only needed your children to the age of seven to be able to have a hold on them for the rest of their lives.
Peter Hain concedes that Catholic schools can have Catholic children for twice as long, until they are fourteen. After that, they will be in a
more open educational market.

Anyone who argues against this will be accused of lacking all economic good sense and wanting to prolong the segregation of children for no good reason.

But the Catholic system was founded to keep Catholic children separate from Protestant children and to preserve Catholic schools with a distinct ethos. Wasn't it? And if a Catholic ethos cannot be preserved in a mixed school, then how can the bishops assent to the sort of changes which Hain is proposing?

Hain must be rubbing his hands with glee, thinking about the number of points he scores by bashing the Catholic school system.
He is signalling to the Catholic community that if it wants to preserve its school system intact, it must get its MLAs into the assembly, so that they can drive the reforms.

He is signalling to Ian Paisley and Unionism generally that the Catholic Church has no sway over him and won't be spared a good thump should the notion take him.

He is getting tough economically and, at the same time, appealing to the liberal, anti sectarian voice in Northern Ireland. It's not often that a politician gets a chance to be a slasher and a radical social reformer in one stroke.

Hain is going for the cornerstone of institutionalised sectarianism here, the schools, a target too big for any local politician to contemplate attacking. Can you imagine what would happen if, say, Nigel Dodds as Education Minister in the executive was trying to drive through something like this?

And what is the Catholic Church to say in its defence?
If it argues the need for an ethos that relies on segregation, it will come across as chauvinistic, sectarian and impractical.

Anyway, where is this the ethos? What is it? The old religious orders are gone; if my old form master, Brother Gibbons, came back into the classrooms where he taught in the 1960s, he would think he was in a Protestant school.

Hain's reform is made possible by the more secularised character of modern Northern Ireland. The modern Catholic parent is not going to fret about wee Johnny or Mary not saying enough prayers during the day, because that prayer laden culture is already gone.
Nor will parents fret much about boys and girls rubbing shoulders in the corridor. Good luck to them.

But there is one thing that parents will worry about, and that is their children having to cross interfaces, go into strange areas and expose themselves to sectarian jibes on the other side.

That is what will defend the Catholic system, the ossified, geographic, segregation of communities. Hain won't be able to change that, and failing that, it is more likely that the Catholic child from, say St Dominic's on the Falls, will be going, not to Boys Model, to join, say, a commputer programming class, but to St Louise's or St Mary's. And that will keep the bishop happy.

If You Ask Me Archive