Lessons in the power of the church

The overwhelming control of the primary education system that the Catholic Church has held since the Famine results not from charity but from the exercise of power,

Irish Times
Saturday, June 6, 2009
FINTAN O'TOOLE

THIS WEEK, the Government chief whip Pat Carey said an extraordinary thing. Or, rather, a thing that is extraordinary only in Ireland. He suggested, in the context of the negotiations between the Government and religious orders over the fallout from the Ryan report, that this might be the time for the State to “take on its responsibilities for delivering an educational system”.
In almost every other developed society, this would be a virtually incomprehensible statement. In Ireland, it is a potentially potent one. It hints at a realisation that the Ryan report marks the necessity for a whole new deal in Church-State relations, one in which basic services in education (and in health), overwhelmingly funded by the taxpayer, finally come under public control.
To understand the need for such a new deal, it is necessary to understand why Ireland, almost alone among developed societies, allows basic social services to be run by a secretive, hierarchical organisation that has repeatedly been seen to regard itself as accountable to no one – not even to the law.

The great myth that hangs over so much discussion of the Catholic Church’s domination of the education and health systems is that the church stepped in to offer services that the State refused to provide. Had it not been for the church, the story goes, the plain people of Ireland would have been left without schools or medical services.

While there is some truth to this belief in relation to the conditions of the early 19th century, it is largely wrong. Indeed, the opposite is nearer the truth – the church consistently undermined State services, fought to limit their expansion and consistently put the maintenance of its own power ahead of the interests of vulnerable people.

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