Mayo People Before Profit candidate says separation of church and state should be a general election issue

PEOPLE Before Profit’s Mayo general election candidate has said the separation of church and state should be a key issue in the upcoming general election.

Joe Daly was speaking in light of a scoping inquiry which revealed that 42 religious orders harboured at least 844 alleged abusers in Irish schools, amounting to a minimum of 2,400 allegations of sexual abuse.

These include four schools in Mayo, where a total of six allegations have been documented against five alleged abusers. 

Mr Daly, who teaches in St Gerald’s College in Castlebar, called for all schools to be brought into public ownership.

At present, over 88 percent of primary schools and 48 percent of secondary schools are under the patronage of religious orders. 

“We have the farcical and undemocratic situation where the majority of schools are providing religious based instruction in publicly-funded schools with publicly paid teachers in a way that is completely at odds with the majority views of the public in terms of issues like divorce, a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and LGBTQ+ issues for example marriage equality and trans right,” said Mr Daly. 

““While the 1998 Education Act provides for the right of students to opt out of religious instruction on an individual basis this is a token gesture to allow the church to maintain control while the whole ethos of schools under religious patronage discriminates and promotes one religion.”

Mr Daly cited a survey of 1,000 people carried out by the Opinion market research agency in May 2023 for the Education and Training Board lreland (ETBI) where 9 percent of adults said they would prefer a religious body to provide education in schools. Sixty-one percent of respondents said they would prefer a multi-denominational system.

He also described the process of transferring patronage of schools as ‘a complete failure’.

“The establishment parties lack the political will to upset the Church hierarchy, so it will require a genuine left government to bring all schools into public ownership and control in a secular system that treats religion as a private matter,” he said. 

“The question is do parties like Sinn Féin have the political courage to join People Before Profit in making this a serious issue in the upcoming general election?”

Mr Daly has become the latest in an ever-growing field of declared general election candidates in Mayo. 

He stood unsuccessfully in the recent local election, receiving 246 first preferences in the Castlebar Local Electoral Area, where a total of 19 candidates were on the ballot. 

Mr Daly also stood for People Before Profit in the last general election, where he was eliminated after the third count after obtaining 721 first preference votes.