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Unionist members of the Northern Ireland Assembly lent their support last week to the Church of Ireland in its battle with the Republic of Ireland’s Education Minister Batt O’Keefe over cuts in state funding for Protestant schools.

During a debate over Education cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland at Stormont, Democratic Unionist member Mervyn Storey challenged the Northern Ireland education minister, Caitriona Ruane (Sinn Féin) to intercede with her counterpart, Mr. O’Keefe on behalf of Protestant schools in the Republic.

Given the cut in funding and the “the subsequent remarks made by the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Paul Colton, that those cuts made the Irish Republic a hostile place for the children of the Protestant minority, and the fact she always tells the House how important equality is to her, what representation has the Northern Ireland Minister of Education made to the Minister in the Irish Republic to ensure equality of treatment?” Mr. Storey asked.

Mrs. Ruane responded that she believed that “all sectors throughout the island of Ireland should be treated in a fair and equal manner,” and that this was the policy of the government “in this part of Ireland.”

However, Mr. Storey’s concerns would best be met by writing to “Minister in the South of Ireland, she said.

Ulster Unionist member Danny Kennedy rose and said the minister’s remarks were “unsatisfactory;” pressing Mrs. Ruane to support the Church of Ireland’s campaign in support of fair treatment for Protestant schools.

Mrs. Ruane repeated that she believed that “all sectors should be treated in an equal and fair manner,” which prompted cries of “shame” from the Unionist benches, forcing the speaker to call the assembly to order and move to the next item of business.

On Nov 1, Bishop Colton posted a comment on his “Twitter” account reporting he had received sectarian letters of abuse in response to his comments last month. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at some of the anonymous, sectarian letters I’ve opened today in response to Protestant schools debate,” he wrote.

Speaking last month in Cork, Bishop Colton accused Mr. O’Keeffe of hiding behind his lawyers advice on the funding of Protestant schools. “Are we seriously to believe that the founding fathers and framers of our Constitution envisaged a situation where this Republic would become a hostile place for the children of the Protestant minority?” he asked.

The dispute centers round the government’s cut of €2.8 million in funding to 21 Protestant schools.

First published in The Church of England Newspaper. The Church of Ireland’s Bishop of Cork has accused Irish Education Minister Batt O’Keefe of hiding behind his legal advisers in a row over a cut in government funding for Protestant schools. In a speech given last week at Midleton College, Cork, the Rt Rev Paul Colton denounced the “brutality and financial back street butchery inflicted on Protestant schools in last year’s budget.”

Protestant secondary schools were removed from the free education scheme, after more than 40 years, with grants for caretaker and secretarial expenses discontinued. In his Oct 20 charge to the Dublin and Glendalough synod, Archbishop John Neill charged the cuts were politically motivated, with the government assuming that Protestant schools only catered to the wealthy.

The Irish government had mounted a “very determined and doctrinaire effort… to strike at a sector which some officials totally failed to understand,” the archbishop said.

In a statement given to the Dáil on Oct 20 Mr O’Keefe defended the government decision to withdraw the €2.8m subsidy saying the attorney general had advised him that it was unconstitutional. However, he declined to release the report saying it was confidential, adding that the Church of Ireland had so far failed to come up with alternatives to the Budget cuts.

Bishop Colton responded, “Are we seriously to believe that the founding fathers and framers of our Constitution envisaged a situation where this Republic would become a hostile place for the children of the Protestant minority?” Mr O’Keefe was hiding “behind secret advice about the document, not his alone, but the charter of the people of this country – our Constitution,” the bishop charged.

He also denied the government’s assertion the Church of Ireland had not offered its own proposal, noting he had met “with some of the Minister’s most senior officials” to discuss the issues.

“Our proposal is this and for clarity I state it, yet again, publicly, we want our schools, in their uniquely difficult situation, restored to parity with schools in the free scheme, where they have been since free education was introduced 42 years ago,” he said.

However the minister “chooses not to hear it,” Bishop Colton charged.

First printed in The Church of England Newspaper. Anglican leaders in the Republic of Ireland have accused the government of discrimination, amidst fears that a cut in state funding for Protestant schools will force students out of the voluntary sector. In a statement printed in the Irish Times on Oct 5, the former Archdeacon of Dublin, the Ven Gordon Linney charged the government’s 2009 budget “singled out the Protestant secondary school sector for damaging treatment by removing the majority of our schools from the free education scheme. Funding and benefits were withdrawn without notice on top of other cuts imposed across the education sector.”

The government’s treatment of Catholic and Protestant schools was unequal, Archdeacon Linney said, and “our schools were hit harder than any others.” While the state supports Catholic and Protestant pupils on an equal per capita basis, “what is unfair and discriminatory is the fact that Catholic children have additional supports in their schools through various grants and a much better teacher-pupil ratio,” he said.

In 1969 the Irish government agreed to support voluntary Protestant schools, providing grants and teacher salaries at the same rate as for Catholic schools. The government’s education budget, Anglican leaders have warned, will upset this balance.

In his address to the Clogher Synod on Sept 27 Bishop Michael Jackson said the budget cuts “hit very hard at an agreement which had, since the foundation of the State, enabled Protestant people in the Republic of Ireland to provide and to experience education in accordance with the Protestant ethos.”

“One fell administrative swoop has cut at the root of this and the devastation of its impact raises serious and ongoing questions about respect for Protestant identity as an interwoven component in national identity,” he said.

In a Sept 29 statement, the House of Bishops of the Church of Ireland voiced its concern over the “failure of government to perceive the distinctive needs of the Protestant minority, not least in the provision of education for a dispersed community which is certainly not characterised by its desire for any kind of educational elitism.”

Church of Ireland schools served Protestants, Catholics as well as those from other faiths or of no faith, they said. However, a “faith-based education often leads to a fruitful outcome in terms of the holistic needs of the child. In a rushed and distracted world, space needs to be made for responding to the presence and the mystery of God,” they said.

“We wish to affirm the importance of equality of opportunity and provision within education,” the bishops said, but also wanted to “express particular concern about those forms of selective intake which may produce academic excellence for some, but which in the long term may foment in others a sense of failure and injustice” arising from the government’s education budget.

Bishop Jackson told the Clogher synod it was “not our wish either to prop up the past or to live in the past” by supporting church schools. “It is our concern, in fulfilling educational aspirations for the children and young people in our care, to make through them an open-ended contribution to public life and active citizenship. Our capacity to do so has been seriously endangered and needs to be safeguarded,” he said.

The Church of Ireland has criticized Northern Ireland’s education minister for excluding Protestant churches from the commission reorganizing the province’s post-primary education system.

“We now seem to be being specifically squeezed out of the process and I don’t think that members of the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian Church the Methodist Church and the other churches across Northern Ireland will be pleased to see that happening,” the Archbishop of Armagh Dr. Alan Harper said last week.

On March 4, NI education minister Caitriona Ruane announced that a child’s post-primary school will depend on the area in which it lives. A central and five regional coordinating groups with representatives from the education and library boards, the Roman Catholic Church, and Irish language groups has been formed to craft recommendations for the government in implementing the education reforms.

On March 10, Archbishop Harper and the leaders of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches released a statement expressing their “deep disquiet” over their exclusion from the reform committee. “The minimal nature of the assurance from the Department of Education that it will look at how the Protestant churches can be a part of the planning process” was inadequate they said and urged the school governors appointed by the Protestant churches be included in the process “by right.”

“On grounds of equality and for the enhancement of community confidence ” the Protestant church leaders urged the government to give them “specific assurance that their concerns will be fully addressed.”

Responding to Unionist objections to the reform groups’ makeup, Ms Ruane denied there was an intention to exclude the Protestant church and told the Assembly that there “must have been a breakdown in communication.”

The Church of Ireland and the Protestant churches of Ulster have called upon the Northern Ireland Assembly to block government plans to remove church appointed governors from the boards of state primary and secondary schools.

Sacking church appointed school governors “will at a stroke remove the Christian ethos as of right from the controlled sector of education,” a coalition comprising the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian and Methodists churches said in a statement released on Dec 7.

Beginning in the 1930’s Ulster’s Protestant church schools passed into state hands, with the understanding that their Christian ethos would be preserved. Under the terms of the transfer, four out of nine school governor places were reserved for church nominees, and this right of representation was extended to all new schools built by the government.

However the government’s Review of Public Administration has proposed rescinding this right of representation on the grounds that it is discriminatory and contravenes the equality requirements of the Northern Ireland Acts.

Church places would only be reserved for schools that had been transferred by the churches to state control. However, the new regulations would not apply to Catholic maintained schools, the government said.

“Whilst a broad Christian ethos will be retained in Catholic schools, it will no longer be reflected in schools which pupils from the Protestant tradition will attend. Catholic schools will continue as of legal right to have faith representatives on Boards of Governors, however schools attended mainly by Protestant pupils, will be prohibited by law from having any official Church representation,” the coalition argued.

While supporting the rights of Catholic schools to “protect their Christian ethos”, the Protestant churches have asked the government to ensure “parity of treatment” with their Catholic counterparts.