Catholic Education at the Crossroads: Issues Facing Catholic Schools in Northern Ireland

It is no exaggeration to state that Catholic education in Northern Ireland today faces some very serious challenges. Not that there is anything unique or novel about this. The role and very existence of the Catholic schooling system has been questioned and contested by many powerful social forces since the fi rst Education Act was enacted in Ireland in 1831. Such is the signifi cance that education has played in Ireland over the last three centuries that almost every serious academic or even lightweight journalistic analysis of the “Irish problem” contains a section on or reference to the issue of Catholic schools; and not without good cause. In a divided society such as Northern Ireland, it is only natural and correct that the role of education should be closely scrutinised and monitored to assess how effective schools are in promoting tolerance, mutual understanding, and the common good. For some, Catholic schooling is an anathema and an anachronistic aberration, which should be consigned to the dustbin of history. Some educationalists and other academics have fl ocked to the side of those who suggest that if Northern Ireland is to become a pluralist, accommodating, and tolerant society at peace with itself, then it must embrace and foster educational visions and structures, which will help to deliver this inclusive society. For such thinkers this aspiration is synonymous with the promotion of the integrated sector. The (not always) unspoken corollary is that faith-based schools—specifically Catholic schools in the context of Northern Ireland—are in some way inferior, backward, and even dangerous in so far as they, so their critics claim, contribute to division and the continuation of sectarian attributes. The Professor of History at University College Dublin, Roy Foster (1988), sums up this attitude when he asserts that “if the idea that antagonistic attitudes and cultural apartheid are sustained by separate schooling is a liberal cliché, it is a liberal cliché because it is true” (p. 21).