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Education Minister Ruairi Quinn addressed the Catholic Primary School Management Association’s Annual Conference today and updated them on progress following the setting up of the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in 2011:

In 2007, the Irish Bishop’s Conference published a document entitled “Catholic Primary Schools, A Policy Provision into the Future.”

That document made it clear that “the Catholic Church accepts there should be choice and diversity within a national education system, and so it believes that parents who desire schools under different patronage should, where possible, be facilitated in accessing them.”

This sentiment was clearly endorsed by Bishop Leo O’Reilly in 2009, when he remarked that “a greater plurality of school provision in our society is desirable and necessary to meet the needs of a more pluralist Irish society.”

Following on from the publication of the Bishops’ document, it was of course Archbishop Diarmuid Martin who first proposed the idea of a forum on patronage and pluralism.

The Forum, chaired by Prof. John Coolahan, reported a year ago.

The report of the Forum examines how demand for different types of patronage can be met in areas of stable population, by divesting patronage of existing schools where there is evidence of parental demand for change.

Read Minister Quinn's full speech

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