AT its annual conference in April, Labour will debate probably the most obnoxious proposal to come before any party in a long time. It is contained in a document that is a swingeing attack on denominational schools.
David Quinn writes in The Independent: Senator Joe McCarthy of anti-communism fame would be proud of the recommendation. It says that senior civil servants in the Department of Education should be screened to ensure they are not “Catholics first and Irish second”.
If Fianna Fail was to debate a similar motion at its ard fheis, calling for the screening of civil servants who might be “Protestants first and Irish second”, there would rightly be uproar at the suggestion that to be Protestant is somehow to be less Irish. That is how we used to think. Has that suspicion now transferred to Catholics?
Aside from a report in this newspaper, there has been almost no reaction in the national media to the proposal before the Labour Party. This is very curious. At least three BBC programmes in Northern Ireland have run items on it. I was interviewed for one of them myself. But to the best of my knowledge, RTE hasn’t bothered with the story at all.
The document from which this recommendation springs has been adopted by the Dublin North Central council of the Labour Party and is known as ‘the Clontarf Report’. Labour’s TD for the area, Aodhan O Riordain, confirmed to ‘The Irish Catholic’ that he supports the document.
Mr O Riordain is a sort of Ivana Bacik mark two. He also told ‘The Irish Catholic’ that he believes: “Religious ethos has no place in the education sector of a modern republic.”