Chapter 1: What challenges do parents face with religious instruction in schools?
Or you can reach me on email, lifeline at rte.ie.
And Dr. Gabrielle Tracy is on the line. Gabrielle, tell me a little bit about the issue that you face with your kids' school.
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.
0818715815, if other people have walked this difficult road, I want to join us too. Did you assume, Gabrielle, before they went to school that there would just be standard protocols that would kick into gear? Oh, your kids, you don't want to do religious instruction. That's fine. Here's what happens.
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.
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Chapter 2: How can parents navigate opting out of religious education?
And that's very much a school to school basis as well. And that's due to the lack of guidelines from the department at the moment. So you can be very lucky or you can be very, very unfortunate depending on the school that you end up in and the teachers that you work with and the principals that you're dealing with. And even with that within a school,
the situation changes from teacher to teacher in some cases. So each year it's a different conversation in a different way with a different person. The lack of guidelines is hard.
Yeah, I wonder again, you know, what experience other people have. I assume maybe in... you know, big schools in urban areas with several hundred kids in them, maybe, you know, that there would be enough and they've dealt with this enough. They probably have their own protocols. I wonder, maybe that's pure speculation on my part. I just wonder just by doing it every year.
I'd be kind of disagree if you were to read some of the testimonials coming from parents from all over the country.
Really, even in those bigger schools, it can be completely ad hoc.
Even in the bigger schools, it can be very ad hoc. And it's again, the schools are... I suppose to clarify my point on this, like we're in a very fantastic school. The teachers are amazing. The school is wonderful. But we've fought long and hard for our update options here and to get the system that we have in place with the school. And that's because all schools are operating in a vacuum here.
So there's no guidance from the Department of Education. And the schools themselves are up to their tonsils with work and paperwork and dealing with everything else. I mean, it's a very difficult situation for them. It's as frustrating for them as it is for us. to have to have repeated meetings and phone calls and sending emails when something else is happening.
And that's all in the absence of any clear direction from the department. And I mean, they could sort this overnight by simply issuing guidelines to the schools on how to manage this and the schools can work with that. But as it stands, it's an individual thing, just back and forth. And that's in all schools across the board, you know.
And how then have you navigated it with your school, you know, in terms of the daily religious instruction and then the big events, the sacraments?
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Chapter 3: What assumptions do parents make about school protocols for religious instruction?
So basically, everybody is getting ready and they're doing all the bits and pieces. And I've had conversations with these parents. And these parents don't go to church. These parents don't believe. But they will still go through the motions. And they go through the motions because this is what's been put in place. It's become integrated into it.
So it's not about, you know, how much harm did it do? It's the fact that it's It's, what's the word, entrenched, ingrained into people.
And that is the damage. It's a cultural touchstone, though, that if you went through, you like maybe the idea of your kids going through it as well. Not necessarily from an entrenched religious point of view, but from an experiential point of view.
100%. 100%. And if somebody wants to grasp that as part of their identity, that's absolutely fine. But that's not what this discussion is about. This discussion is about children being able to attend state-funded schools with their constitutional right not to attend religion. This is not an attack on religion. This is not about taking religion away from people.
This is simply saying that between 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock, children should be able to go to school without any discrimination. And that religion, as we all talk about, religion and politics should never be discussed, as everybody says. If they were discussed a bit more, maybe there'd be less problems. But they're personal.
And because they're personal, they should be done in your own personal time, within your own personal community. Publicly funded schools are not there for that reason. And teachers are there to teach, not to do the work of the church or parents. That would be my view. There's no cultural attack, there's no removing religion from people's lives.
It's simply saying you can still go to church, children can still do their Holy Communion and their Confirmation, as many do. There's Catholic children who attend Church of Ireland. I have friends of mine who are Catholic and they attend a Church of Ireland school because it's their local school. All three of her children did their sacraments outside of the school within the community.
There was no problem.
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Chapter 4: What is the impact of lack of guidelines from the education department?
And they still attended church and they still were still exceptionally good friends. You know, that's not what this is about. This is about the isolation and exclusion that children face within 88.5% of the schools that we have in this country.
Yeah, it's, you know, I can understand the point of view of people who... who feel an attachment to what's familiar and feel a personal sense of attachment maybe to the school that they went to. And if they're still living locally, they like their kids having the same experience. But I can't remember who said this to me before, Gabriel, but they said, and it was an interesting way of putting it.
They said, imagine if at the foundation of the state, they just set up a secular school system like existed in France. And somebody came out now in 2026 and said, do you know what we should do? We should make 90% of the schools Catholic and include religious instruction. as part of the school ethos, they'd be laughed out of the room. Nobody would take them seriously.
Yeah.
But it's what we have.
I mean, I think it is what we have. And we're outliers across Europe with this. And this is one of the things that I face a lot with these discussions, is this Catholic identity and everything else. And that's, like I keep saying, this is not what this is about. Some of the most Catholic countries we have in Europe, take Spain and Italy, for example.
Faith formation doesn't happen during school hours, so it doesn't affect the level of Catholics or the Catholicness of a nation to not have faith formation happening within school hours.
Yeah, it's a legacy of the state outsourcing so much services, including the health system and everything else. When they were stone broke. Understandably, they were stone broke, but this is a legacy that we're still living with.
And still the same. And that's why this is such a big issue, because, you know, it can't be reversed overnight because of that very fact.
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