Max McGuinness on why the Church still runs the show.
While the travesty of Bertie's mega-bucks is undoubtedly significant, it took an article in yesterday's Guardian to highlight the root cause of a much greater national scandal - educational apartheid in Balbriggan. This sentence from Henry McDonald's dispatch shows how little has really changed in Ireland:
"Dozens of children from non-Irish ethnic backgrounds had been turned down by local Catholic schools principally because they did not hold Catholic baptismal certificates."
Read it again. This is how far we have come. After two decades of the "Celtic Tiger" you'd better be a catholic if you want to learn to read and write and the very best of luck if you believe in something even weirder than Protestantism - like Voodoo.
The obvious point here is that this is a clear breach of these children's human rights. Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares: "All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination." Telling a kid to piss off because he's a muslim(or I imagine, because he forgot his baptismal certificate(if one ever existed) back in Port Harcourt) is clearly a case of discrimination so let's start hauling all these insufferable, nylon-bloused bigots in front of the EU. And while they're there, someone could remind them that collective punishement(i.e "no-one goes home until we find out who bent this fork") is explicitly outlawed under the Geneva Convention.
The Catholic Church is still resolutely in the saddle in Ireland because it has privileged, year-long access to the most important minds in the country - those of the young, who will grow up having been thoroughly indoctrinated in nonsense such as the idea that without God there would be no morals.
90% of the schools in this country are controlled by the Catholic Church and most of the remainder are the preserve of a myriad of protestant sects. Even "non-denominational" schools typically peddle some happy clappy, ecumenical version of Christianity.
But no-one in Irish politics is prepared to challenge the status quo whereby the state defers to the clerics on the subject of education, leading to the current racist mess in North Dublin.
What we need is a complete overhaul of the system which banishes all priests, imams, lamas, rabbis, and curates from our schools. Otherwise, Balbriggan-type scenarios will multiply in the next few decades - sending Irish society into a tailspin of ghettoisation.
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