Dr. Gabrielle Tracy

Hi, Ciarán.

Thank you very much for having me.

I'm...

I suppose the issue we have at the moment is that my kids are in a Catholic school and unfortunately not by choice.

We are living in Cavan and there's no non-denominational schools.

That would be my preference for my kids.

And the locality where we are, I mean, the choice of schools I have are 17 different schools and every single one of them is Catholic.

So we've had, obviously that's where my children go, which is their local school.

And I suppose it's taken us a little bit of time to try and arrange the kind of off-date arrangements for them around religious instruction because they don't attend religious instruction.

So I think that's kind of the main purpose of the conversation today is to really discuss what many, many parents are facing in this country in that situation is trying to get...

proper guidelines really, I suppose, around the update options for children in schools because as it currently stands, there are zero update guidelines being issued by the department to any of the schools.

So parents like myself are in a repeated cycle of constant communication with the school and clock watching and looking out for different times of the year for various different religious things that are happening and ensuring that our children aren't

completely excluded and that they're looked after.

So yeah, it's a difficult road to walk, unfortunately.

I would like to say that that's what I assumed, but thankfully I did my homework and I realised that wasn't going to be the case.

So, you know, it would be something that you would hope that every parent can assume that if your child attends a state-funded school, that they will be treated as equal and that their constitutional rights would be upheld.

And unfortunately, that's not the case.

So I had, thankfully, with the likes of Education Equality, there's a lot of information out there

for parents like myself that choose to have their children removed from religious instruction and the best ways to go about navigating that.

And that's very much a school to school basis as well.