In the best traditions of cynical political and corporate public relations strategising, the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association (CPSMA) wanted the Department of Education to carry out a survey ("Role of religion in school admissions", Irish Times letters page, Jan 14th). This would have taken time to organise, to carry out, and aeons more time to debate when its predictably ambiguous results would have come in. In the meantime, the status quo would have been maintained, which is exactly what the CPSMA desires.
They now claim to have done a survey themselves. The validity of this, carried out as it was by a party with a commitment to one side of the matter being examined, must be questionable in the extreme. On top of all that, such a survey is irrelevant, because if even a small number of children are obliged to remain exposed to religious indoctrination as the price of a state-funded education when their parents do not desire it, then we live in a country that simply cannot be called a republic.
ENDS
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