Secondary School Religious Ethos in Ireland

Madison Dwyer is a senior in the School of Foreign Service majoring in International Politics and minoring in Jewish Civilization.

Ireland has always had a complicated relationship with Catholicism. The country is often associated with the concept of cultural Catholicism, with many people holding onto “a loose badge of cultural identity” associated with Catholicism, but having only “tenuous connections to belief and practice.” The education system is one of the most important ongoing intersections between Catholicism and Irish society. For almost two centuries, the Church has used primary and secondary schools as ground zero to cement its social influence over Irish society. Throughout my first fellowship with Global Irish Studies, I explored how religious shifts throughout Irish history have altered education systems in the country, and to what extent the growing presence of secularism has increased access to multi-denominational education in Ireland.

Movements advocating for secular education pose a growing challenge to the Catholic Church’s dominance in classrooms. This is driven by a range of factors. The number of individuals with no specified religion has increased to almost 10 percent of the country’s overall population. The European Commission has supported a norm of a multi-denominational approach to teaching “comparative religious history” in schools rather than explicitly promoting religiosity. Compounding this issue, secularism began to diffuse across Ireland, adding new meaning to the term cultural Catholicism. Despite this, the Church has maintained a tight grip on schools, with 90.6% of primary schools as of 2012 governed by a Catholic ethos.

In the early 2000s, Irish activists began calling for a reconfiguration of the education system in the face of what many viewed as a regressive school curriculum. In response to the growing demand for secular and multi-denominational education, the Educate Together movement—first established in 1978—expanded into the mainstream. By 2008, Educate Together was the fastest-growing educational movement in Ireland, with “10,000 pupils under its tutelage.” In 2021, despite increasing calls for secular and inclusive education, the Irish Catholic bishops launched the “Flourish Programme,” aiming to reinforce the Church’s teachings on marriage and puberty in its patronage schools. Parents have argued that the program is “discriminatory to LGBTQ+ children and families” and “does not correspond with the view of the State,” which has legalized LGTBQ marriage. Education Equality—a grassroots movement of parents in support of the equality principle between all religions in schools—responded to the Flourish Programme with a simple question: “Who should decide whether a child is evangelised at school, the child’s parents or religious clergy?”

Echoing ideas from over 200 years prior, activists are once again demanding the presence of primary schools without denominational indoctrination. It seems—not for the first time in its history—that the cyclical nature of Irish religious politics is showing itself. The process of educational reconfiguration has not proved as successful as many activists have desired. These endeavors aim to end the Catholic Church’s authoritarian rule over the educational system and to provide choice to many parents seeking multi-denominational or non-denominational education for their children. One major limitation to this attempt is the fact that the State only owns 5 percent of Irish primary schools, while the Church owns 90 percent. The Church is now selling some of its primary schools to the State so that they may reopen after reconfiguration as multi-denominational. 

In the process of my research as a GIS Fellow, I sought to take everything I learned from my historical deep dive and find a way to track the success of multi-denominational schools in a contemporary view. In my search for a comprehensive list of schools sorted by religious ethos (Catholic, Protestant, Inter-Denominational, Jewish, Methodist, Quaker, Muslim, Presbyterian), I was originally disheartened to discover that the data set I was hoping for was not easily accessible. As a result, I established my data set by cross-referencing the most recent numbers from the Central Statistics Office (dating back to 2016) with an updated list of all 3995 schools certified by the Irish government. 

Figure 1 is a map plotting Catholic secondary schools throughout the Republic of Ireland compared to county populations. Notably, County Leitrim has zero Catholic or Protestant secondary schools. This is particularly interesting due to Leitrim’s status as a border county with Northern Ireland.

Figure 2  is a map of Church of Ireland (Protestant) secondary schools compared to county populations.

Finally, Figure 3 is a map of multi-denominational and inter-denominational schools compared to the county population. Fittingly, Leitrim leads the county with the most multi- and inter-denominational schools.

While access to multi- and inter-denominational education has improved, it still falls short of the aspirations of many Irish activists. Interesting patterns in the prevalence of Catholic and Protestant secondary schools by county have opened the door to even more avenues of exploration to study the effectiveness of grassroots movements advocating for increased access to secular education and the pervasiveness of ideas such as cultural Catholicism.

Ireland’s unique history with the Catholic Church and religion more broadly has resulted in a tense negotiation of power between state-run institutions and the Church, and there is nowhere more affected by these dynamics than the schools. The educational system has been an important point of contention in this power struggle for centuries, leading to the aphorism that “whoever controls the schools rules the world.” Ireland is no stranger to this adage, and as far back as 1659, politicians and pastors alike have been trying to brazenly out-maneuver each other, to the detriment of school-aged children around the country. Today, there is an unprecedented momentum in the push for secular education in Ireland. Instead of exclusively Catholic-operated primary and secondary schools, parents want—above all else—freedom of choice and toleration of all faiths. One proposed Educate Together school in Dublin received over “2,000 expressions of interest” when first announced.

Although Irish ideas of secularism in schools have permeated the political and cultural landscape for hundreds of years, the country still has quite a long way to go to reach widespread accessibility of multi- and inter-denominational education options.