Mags GarganDear Editor, In the light of current media concerns with education in the State, some elementary facts need to be outlined.
1. Most Catholic schools were built on land donated by Catholics; the capital costs of building these schools were borne by Catholics
2. The maintenance and running costs of these schools is partly met out of taxes either paid directly by mainly Catholic taxpayers or indirectly suffered by those Catholic taxpayers.
3. The rest of the running costs are met by the parents (mostly Catholic) of children attending those schools. This is in the form of “voluntary” donations. Some parishes also raise funds for local schools from the general local Catholic population.
To describe such schools as State or State-funded is, I suggest, a gross misrepresentation of the reality.
That does not answer the important question of access to schooling by the children of non-Catholics or their exclusion from the Catholic ethos in such schools. If the State wishes to take over Catholic schools then it should do so on a freely negotiated basis. What then I wonder is the market value of a school which has existed for up to 100 years and is capable of continuing to so exist, population movements permitting?
I would further add that, since it was the likes of me, my parents and forebears who financed those schools any return of our capital should be placed in the hands of the laity and not the hierarchy, who I frankly regard as incompetent and impractical.
Yours etc.,
Gerald Murphy,
Marley Grange,
Dublin 16.