Mags Gargan
Archbishop Eamon Martin has said that claims that non-believers are being forced to baptise their children in order to get them into their local Catholic school are “hugely overstated”.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, the Primate of All-Ireland said people would be “almost forgiven for thinking every Catholic school in this country are insisting on baptismal certificates to get into Catholic schools” when in reality it rarely occurs.
“I have never as a priest, in all my years of ministry, come across a situation where I thought parents were bringing children to Baptism simply to get into school. I have no knowledge of this criterion being used,” he said.
“In Ireland something like only 20% of schools are oversubscribed, so for 80% it is not an issue. In the 20% I would contend that a tiny fraction are using this criterion. I don’t have the evidence but I know from the ground that this idea that you need to produce a baptismal cert to get into a Catholic school is massively overstated.”
The archbishop said that a “whole list of criteria” such as residence in parish and whether brothers and sisters are already in school, are being used in the vast majority of schools “but somebody will always be disappointed when schools are oversubscribed, unless the Government ensures there is adequate provision of school places in every parish”.
The archbishop said his own preference would be that Baptism would not be used as a criterion “because it is open to potential misuse” but that this “is a question for the patron and board of management of the school”. However he pointed out that if non-believers are getting their children baptised for school entry “we would see an increase of older children being baptised just before school age, which is rarely happening, and you would expect Baptism rates in areas of oversubscribed schools to be higher than the Baptism rates in an areas where they are undersubscribed, and there is no evidence of that.”