Greg DalyDear Editor,
I was appalled at the attitude of Junior Minister, Aodhán O Ríordáin to changing the laws that help preserve the ethos of denominational schools of all religions. This is the man who once said that civil servants should not give any undue deference to churchmen. His cynical plan is to make the law preserving school ethos inoperable. A religious school is morally entitled to staff that support its values.
All this, one supposes, flows from the recent referendum circus and the minister waxes lyrical about the plight of teachers hiding their sexual identities. In fact, as a percentage of the population, homosexuals are surprisingly few.
In England, National Statistics did a vast survey of adults and found that 1.5% of the adult population was homosexual (including gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender).
In the United States, the Battelle Survey, funded by the US Government, found 1.1% of adult males and 0.4% of females in the United States were homosexual. There seems no reason to consider that Irish statistics would differ from those. The number of teachers he is talking about must be very few.
The Government spent €20 million to accommodate a small section of that 1.5% of the population that is homosexual, which was already adequately catered for by the Civil Partnership Act 2010, and ignored all consequences affecting the other 98.5% of the population.
Yours etc.,
John O’Reilly,
Merrion Square,
Dublin 2.