On Wednesday (December 17th) the patronage for six new secondary schools in Dublin, Meath and Wicklow was announced. All six schools were awarded to the English-medium patron bodies Educate Together and the Education And Training Boards (ETBs).
As a result of this decision an additional 4,600 school places will be added to the English-medium sector, while capacity in the Irish-medium sector will remain static.
Four of the six new schools will be located in Dublin in Blanchardstown, Rathcoole/Saggart, Goatstown/Stillorgan and Dublin 6/6W. The remaining two schools will be located in Enfield, Co Meath and Greystones/Kilcoole, Co Wicklow. All six schools are due to open their doors for the first time in September 2020.
In all six areas the Irish language school patron body, An Foras Pátrúnachta, sought to win the patronage of the new schools. But in each case the Department awarded the schools to English-medium patron bodies, largely on the basis that that demand for English-medium education was greater than local demand for Irish-medium education.
By this logic An Foras Pátrúnachta will only be able to win patronage of future schools in the most exceptional of circumstances.
Wednesday’s announcement has again highlighted the deep flaws within the process that the Department of Education use to decide the patronage of new schools.
That process starts when the Department identifies an area where a new school is needed to meet increased demand for school places. Once the decision has been taken to establish a new school the Department invites interested patron bodies to apply for patronage and then asks local parents to ‘vote’ online for their preferred patron. The patron body that receives the most ‘votes’ is invariably awarded the patronage of the new school.
While the theory of parents casting ‘votes’ for their preferred patron body is superficially democratic, the reality of how the process actually works is anything but.
Like any election the number of votes that each patron body receives is largely determined by the scale and quality of the ‘campaign’ that they run to win the ‘votes’ of local parents.
These ‘campaigns’ are run at a local and national levels, using public meetings, printed materials, social media, corporate media and other means to win ‘votes’. And this is where money and the ability of external forces to influence the future direction of the education system comes into play.
The most dramatic example, to date, of such external interference came on January 18th of this year when Educate Together announced that it had received a donation of $1,000,000 / €878,000 from the US tech giant Saleforce.
The Educate Together press release announcing the donation explicitly stated that the money would be used to help that patron body establish new primary and secondary schools.
While no other patron body has received a private corporate donation on this scale, some other patrons have powerful, wealthy backers including Catholic, Protestant and Muslim institutions and in the case of the ETBs, the state itself.
None of these patron bodies are particularly interested in the Irish language as demonstrated by their failure to adopt full-immersion education. Each is instead focused on building its own empire of schools and influence.
An Foras Pátrúnachta are are thus pitted against powerful, well-funded entities, including the state itself, as well as centuries of anti-Irish language sentiment and policy.
No republic worthy of the name would allow private corporations, religious institutions or other vested interests to have such influence on the state’s education system and the spending of vast sums of public monies.
Éirígí For A New Republic wants to see the current system for establishing new schools abandoned in favour of an entirely new secular public education system that will provide all children from all religions and all income backgrounds with equal educational opportunities and outcomes; a new education system that would be delivered through the medium of the Irish language from pre-school to university. level.
Developing a publicly controlled Irish language education system is one of the steps that must be taken to bring the Irish language back into widespread everyday usage. Anything less amounts to nothing but tokensim.