Sir, – Roderick Downer (Letters, July 20th) quotes Archbishop Robin Eames and Denis Bradley in 2009 stating that “reconciliation may never be achieved if our children continue to attend separated schools”.
This is an issue that has stubbornly resisted attempts to address it. More than a century ago in the Irish Convention – that last All-Ireland attempt to fashion a common future for the island, comprising representative politicians and clerics – eminent Methodist doctor Sir William Whitla tried to raise the question of the educational apartheid that was a defining feature of Irish society.
He lauded the value of a mixed education. Whitla reminded “the right reverend prelates that the working of denominational education in recent years had made vastly more difficult the prospect of agreement on the national question”.
He ended “by suggesting that the Protestant and Roman Catholic prelates, the Presbyterian Moderator, and a few lay members of the Convention should informally meet to discuss frankly and freely this great and vital problem”.
RM Block
The right reverend prelates were having none of this. “At once”, Convention chairman Sir Horace Plunkett reported to the King, “Dr Harty, the [Catholic] Archbishop of Cashel, rose to reply.”
It was a principle of Catholic educational teaching, Harty agreed, that there should be a mingling of the religious and the secular – but only within the denominational redoubt.
He made it absolutely plain that, in Plunkett’s words, “educational progress along undenominational lines was, for the present, barred”. And that was that. No more was heard of Whitla’s suggestion.
Another wasted opportunity to construct the bridges that are the only way of truly unifying this island. – Yours, etc,
IAN D’ALTON,
Naas,
Co Kildare.
