Letter from Princeton

Dear Sir,

In October of 1795 Theobald Wolfe Tone wrote a letter from Princeton, to his friend Thomas Russell, in which he insisted that he would never live in a country where he had to rely on the mercy of a master to do so. He was emphatic that he ‘would exist in no country permissu superiorum’. In keeping with a rich republican tradition, Tone was railing against arbitrary power. All power in a republican polity is checked by law; and so in the ideal you have an ‘empire of laws rather than an empire of men’. Today, almost two and a quarter centuries later, after reading on the front page of the New York Times of the Ryan report, I was prompted to write my own modest Letter from Princeton, where I find myself on a research stint under the Irish-born republican philosopher Philip Pettit. My letter is inspired, of course, by the same vision of liberty as the great Irish republican of 1798.  

In some ways, the most striking feature of the Ryan report is the sheer arbitrariness of it all. We learn that the Irish Department of Education, which held the ultimate responsibility to regulate schools, ran ‘toothless’ inspections that overlooked glaring problems. It was utterly submissive and engaged in a ‘very significant deference’ to church authority. The report notes the various legislative provisions available and argues that the Department of Education of the day ‘should have exercised more of its ample legal powers over schools’. It suggests that these failures ‘can be seen as tacit acknowledgment by the State of the ascendancy of the Congregations and their ownership of the system’. In the end, it is clear that the Catholic Church wielded unchecked control over Irish education. What happened with that control makes for the galling detail of course, and brings the old cliché to mind that ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

The most telling lesson of all of this, at least from a republican perspective, is that no person or group can be trusted with arbitrary power. The citizenry must keep a sharp eye on the powerful. This might mean proper regulation of elite financiers bent on the personal accumulation of wealth, or of religious or political elites or whatever. In any conceivable context it ultimately means that the price of liberty – in the old republican adage – is eternal vigilance. What happened over fifty or so years in Irish life was the consequence of a profound failure to exercise vigilance. There was a wretched silence where otherwise good citizens did nothing.

Interestingly, Wolfe Tone’s letter from Princeton points to a distinction between the notion of a kindly and an evil master; a distinction with quite salient implications for us now as we reflect on persisting religious influence in Irish schools in our own time. True republicans, Tone said, ‘detest ever the name of master’. Even if power is held by the most kindly master imaginable, there is domination. The religious power-wielders described in the Ryan report were anything but kindly masters, of course. While the religious congregations today may not exercise their power in an unkindly manner, they still hold a certain unchecked clout in a way decidedly at odds with republican liberty as non-domination.

The power is unchecked because of an exemption from the Equal Status Acts 2004 which provides that schools can discriminate against families and exclude certain students if to do so is deemed necessary ‘to maintain the particular ethos of the school’. Notably, this exemption must be read in conjunction with the Education Act 1998 which provides that the school board of management must ‘uphold, and be accountable to the patron for so upholding…the cultural, moral, religious…and spiritual values and traditions…of the school’. In the end, the exemption concentrates what is effectively unchecked power into the hands of local schools. Because 92% of primary schools remain under Catholic patronage (and 84% of all schools) in our century, in effect this power brings about domination of non-Catholic families. It places cultural and religious outsiders at the mercy of local school principals and school boards.

The domination brought about by all of this was illustrated last year when the principal of Gorey Community School requested regulation of the wearing of the Islamic hijab in state schools. The Ministers for Education (Batt O’Keeffe T.D.) and Integration (Conor Lenihan T.D.) responded in a report that ‘the current system, whereby schools decide their uniform policy at a local level, is reasonable, works well and should be maintained’. The report conspicuously failed to mention this exemption from the Equal Status Acts. No child was excluded in Gorey, but only by the leave of a kindly master.

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, in a response that was decidedly republican (though presumably somewhat unconsciously), rejected the Ministers’ cop-out arguing that it was ‘to abrogate their own responsibilities to ensure that education is provided in a non-discriminatory way by leaving the decision-making onus on school principals…this would appear to be a policy not to have a policy…[It is] thanks only to the good sense of school principals [that] reason has prevailed and no child has been excluded from school on the basis of their religious dress’.

The opportunity presented by the Tiger economy to quickly achieve the urgently needed fundamental reform in Irish schooling would seem to have been blown by government. But the legal protection of the right for cultural groups to be different in Irish schools could still be achieved at the stroke of a pen. The capacity for discrimination against non-Catholic children must be renounced altogether and wiped from the books. Otherwise, the price of the liberty for non-Catholics in Irish schooling, to paraphrase Gore Vidal, is not eternal vigilance but is instead the eternal discretion of the master.

Yours, etc.

Tom Hickey

Tom Hickey is at Princeton University on a Research Collaborative Project with Professor Philip Pettit in the Centre for Human Values. He is a doctoral candidate at the School of Law, NUIG.