Catholic schools have the right to protect ethos

Dear Editor, So it seems the sale of Aer Lingus isn’t the only thing the Government can be accused of ‘ramming’ though the Dáil.

I was disappointed to read in last week’s edition of The Irish Catholic that plans are afoot to strip Catholic schools and hospitals of one of
the last tools they have to protect their ethos.

Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act is an essential piece of legislation that provides school managers and patrons with the ability to guarantee parents that the principal, teachers and key officers are fully supportive of the ethos of the school their child is attending.

At a time when the Mater Hospital has already agreed to comply with the Government’s abortion law, what will a further stripping of rights for Church-run institutions mean? Whatever about Catholic hospitals, our schools are the most likely to feel the full effect of this particular law change.

Some reports seem to suggest that the revised legislation would offer protections to staff of religious-run medical and educational institutions who are gay, while at the same time allowing such institutions to maintain their religious ethos. My concern is that the Government have offered no insight into how they might go about achieving this.

The bottom line, as Dr John Murray has pointed out, is that no schools discriminate on the basis of sexuality because nobody should be excluded from a school on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Schools, however, do need to be able to protect and support their ethos for the sake of the parents who send their children to a particular school and who are relying on that school to educate their children in accordance with their own faith, beliefs and values.

A full deletion of section 37 will have very serious consequences legally concerning the rights of parents to a particular type of education.

Yours etc,.

Daniel O’Neill,

Milltown,

Dublin 6.