Most Rev. Diarmuid Martin
Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland
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Saint Patrick’s College, Maynooth, 8.00pm, 10th April 2008
Sadly, while education contributed decisively to Ireland’s unprecedented growth and wealth, not enough of the fruits of Ireland’s unprecedented growth and wealth have been poured back into education in a focussed way. We still have school buildings which are not up to adequate standards. We have been slow in addressing the needs of our international children. We still have schools with very high class sizes. We have not got the process of planning right. There is very little thought being given to pre-school education for a future in which most grannies, who now do so much child care, will be working grannies.
I am sure that the Minister for Education would refute me with a baffling list of figures concerning investment in schools especially in recent years. Credit should be given, yes, for what has been done. But deficiencies still exist. One cannot help feeling that these deficiencies should have been addressed when economic resources were plentiful. They will, unfortunately, not be adequately addressed if or when those resources become less. An economic programme which underestimated the value of investment in education clearly misunderstood the nature of a modern economy. Capital investment must include investment in human capital and in the structures which foster social capital.
The Presidents of our two largest Universities only recently set out their concern about how core funding per university student has been reduced by over 33% since 1995, while maintenance and upgrading of the physical infrastructure of universities has virtually ground to a halt through lack of funding. They assert that student/staff ratios in countries like Scotland or Denmark are now four times better than Ireland, and operating budgets in these countries are between two and three times those available here.
They recognized that while the Government has invested heavily in research funding for universities in recent years, the parallel reduction in core funding is making it increasingly impossible for Irish universities to compete on equal terms at international level. Virtually every recent review of the Irish third-level sector, in fact, has concluded that there is a major funding deficit by comparison with relevant international competitors.
Education is the economy. Have we fully realised that? Have we also recognised that while education is the backbone which supports the economy, economic activity is only one dimension of human activity? Have we seen that there is more to growth than increased prosperity and that the balancing of books is not just a mere bookkeeping exercise but consists in identifying how outcomes really respond to needs and ensure optimal and sustainable future growth? The heads of the Universities rightly note that “Education is the key to our future and investment in the creativity, skills and talent of our people will always pay dividends”.
One sees, I might say, a similar failure in health care where structures have been created and capacity generated which now cannot be used because the question of on-going resourcing had not been adequately addressed in advance. Bad planning is bad use of public resources. One can create balanced books through the under-utilisation of resources or capacity, but what you are really doing is falsely calculating the real costs of health care or education.
Despite investment in education there has been there has been lack of planning. I feel that local authorities could be doing more. I am not just talking about the situations which arose last year in Diswilstown or in Balbriggan which have more complex roots than just the questions of school places, of enrolment policies and of patron models.
Ireland is going to have to face a very different religious and ethnic demography in the years to come. To fully understand our pluralist Ireland we need much more research data and much more differentiated research data. We need to look at all the factors involved. What are the factors which are leading to a concentration of immigrants in certain areas? Why is it that some parishes have large concentration of ethnic diversity and others with very similar socio-economic backgrounds have almost none? Many of the factors leading to an unbalanced concentration and possible ghettoes are not educational factors and you cannot expect schools to address them on their own.
Integration requires a positive decision by a community. I have anecdotal evidence that this is not always happening. I hear of parents – even those who might fit into the social categorization of “good catholic parents” – making decisions with their feet or with their four-wheel-drives to opt out of diversity in schools.
In a large urban area like Dublin, mobility is a characteristic of our times. There are schools in Dublin where over 80% of the children come from an area outside the local parish or community. There are many factors, positive and negative, involved. Schools in an area with an ageing population very often aggressively advertise for children from other areas in order to maintain staff size. In many cases parents choose a school near to grandparents who act as child-minders. Parents deliberately choose a school in a socially more favourable area because they genuinely want their children to have a better chance in life. But part of that mobility has been the result of parents opting out of diversity of an ethnic kind or of diversity due to a high incidence of children with special educational needs.
While I recognise that parents have the right to choose the best possible education for their children, I am unhappy when Catholic parents opt out of diversity and send their children to schools precisely because there is less diversity in them. While I recognise that parents have the right to choose the school they consider best, the exercise of rights must also incorporate concern for the common good.
There is also a sense in which government policy contributes to such a flight from diversity, when it does not ask all patron bodies to equitably share the burdens and challenges of diversity. One finds situations in which some patrons are allowed to stick to a policy of small classes and remain small and single stream and the burden then falls on other schools to accommodate all diversity. I cannot say that things are perfect, but the overall record of the Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Dublin in adapting to diversity is excellent.
I would be very unhappy to find that Catholic schools were being deliberately less open to diversity than others and where necessary I am prepared to take steps to redress such situations. I visit our Catholic schools and I see the diversity that is present there. I was greeted in a Catholic school only last week by a young pupil who said to me, “you are a friend of my father”; he was the son of the Imam of one of our Mosques.
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There is no evidence that a totally “religiously neutral secularist society” is the best space in which to foster dialogue between cultures and religions. France, which has perhaps the most secularised school system in Europe, has been particularly marked by racial tensions. There is indeed a sense in which, when it comes down to religious diversity, a more secularist society may not be the best one to be able to understand and guide the phenomenon of religious diversity. Pope Benedict XVI has noted that: “The pathology of religion is the most dangerous sickness of the human spirit. It exists within the religions, yet it exists also precisely where religion as such is rejected and relative goods are assigned an absolute value”. There are forms of secular society in which hostility to religious values forces religious groups into a dangerously narrow perception of their culture and thus sharpens religious differences and misunderstandings in a pluralist society.
Here in Ireland I fear that the desire in certain secularist thought to reduce religion entirely to the private sphere may make it harder to welcome fully the strong religious commitment of many of our immigrant communities. My belief is that inter-religious dialogue can best be addressed by people who are strongly rooted in their own faith, rather than by people who have a confused religious commitment or by people who are not religious at all. What is important, however, is that we all address the situation with a sense of mutual knowledge and respect.
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Our pluralist New Ireland needs a new theory of pluralism. Our young people need to be helped to attain the science of intellectual searching and dialogue on the deeper questions for life and society. The young person in the New Ireland is called to grow towards responsibility within the realities of the culture of the day, influenced by ideas, by life styles, by the basic self-understanding of this concrete society. The young person must learn how to discern within that world where true progress is to be found in his or her own personal lives and in society as a whole. At the same time, the young person has to learn that society is not an abstraction or a force which is absolutely determinant regarding his or her own values and life style. Education will take place in a particular context, but all of us have the ability and indeed the responsibility to change the context within which education can take place.
This challenge of discernment and verification of values begins for young people today at a much younger age than heretofore. The young person is challenged already a second level education to draw the connections between what he or she has received (tradition) and his or her evolving life. This occurs at a moment in which parents and teachers today often feel that their efforts are not having success. It is very often precisely at this age that many parents loose their nerve in speaking about faith with their children. In such a situation it is easy to revert to playing safe. Yet faith requires risk; enhancing freedom entails risk. Rather than engaging in dialogue parents and teachers can feel that it is best to leave it up the young person alone to find his or her way regarding faith. Parents loose their nerve, perhaps also because the Church has let them down by providing very few services to help them in their task or because society adopts a policy of hostility or at best agnosticism to the fundamental questions about truth. A society which looses the nerve to educate can easily find itself adrift.
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I make no claim that what was done in the name of the Catholic Church in education in the past was always what it should have been done. In some cases, I am ashamed of what happened. But I am also proud of what has been achieved and I am genuinely open and enthusiastic about seeing that the wealth of that achievement can be integrated into a future Ireland built up on a new understanding of dialogue and respect.
I quote again from Pope Benedict’s Address to Rome’s University: “The human journey never simply comes to an end; and the danger of falling into inhumanity is never totally overcome, as is only too evident from the panorama of recent history”. Universities in particular will change in the New Ireland. New dimensions of knowledge will emerge. Faith and the Christian tradition – along with the tradition of other beliefs – have much to bring to the debates around these new issues. The university is the place where this debate can find a privileged space.
