Bias against Protestants in budget education cuts alleged

June 6, 2009 by Infowars Ireland

THE GOVERNMENT has been accused of discriminating against Protestants in the Republic with cuts in the education budget announced last October.

The annual conference of the Methodist Conference in Ireland was also told yesterday that the Minister for Education had failed “to show any real understanding of the effects on Protestant schools of the measures taken”.

Speaking to the conference at the Smurfit School in Blackrock, Co Dublin, the general secretary of the church’s Board of Education, Dr John Harris, said some of the cuts “seem particularly insensitive” and, at post-primary level, were “considerably severe and particularly so for Protestant fee-charging schools”.

He said “Protestant schools now receive a proportionally lower allocation of teachers than in the Catholic sector”. Reductions in the pupil-teacher ratio, for instance, would result in the loss of five State-paid teaching posts at Wesley College in Dublin, he said, while cuts in grants would also mean “a loss of almost €250,000 in a full year” there.

He pointed out that in the Republic there were 21 fee-charging Protestant secondary schools, many of which were boarding schools. “In order to provide for Protestant pupils in areas where there is no Protestant second-level school, it is essential that boarding facilities are available if they are to have to opportunity to attend a school with an ethos in keeping with the wishes of parents,” he said.

Yet these 21 secondary schools “seem to have been specifically targeted for the harshest cuts”, he said. He said the Minister had claimed these schools were only being brought into line with the fee-charging Catholic schools.

“The reality is that these 21 schools have had more taken away from them by these cuts than any other sector. It also means that Protestant schools now receive a proportionally lower allocation of teachers than in the Catholic sector. It is hard to see how this kind of discrimination can be justified,” he said.

He recalled that when free education was introduced in 1967, special provision was made for Protestant and other minority faith schools “so that they could be treated equitably”. Since then they had been able to avail of the same basic grants and benefits as other schools in the free scheme.

“This is now suddenly no longer the case,” he said.

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