'Synge Street going all Irish will push out inner-city kids - where will they go now?'
The famous school becoming a gaelscoil will exclude many of its current students to cater to the fashions of the middle-class Irish
There’s been a lot of controversy about education recently.
There was the story of the schoolbook showing the traditional Irish family as a bunch of backwards bigots, like a lampoon from an old Punch magazine. Politicians said it was sneering and discriminatory, which it probably was.
Another cause of debate was how sex education classes will become mandatory for Leaving Cert students. They’ll learn about consent, pornography and sexual violence in an updated SPHE module.
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I believe school is for academic learning, not moral instruction. I’ll look after all that at home myself. What we can take from all this though, is that education is becoming a key battleground in the culture wars.
However, one education story that went completely under the radar deserves much closer inspection. Synge Street CBS - one of the most famous secondary schools in the country - is to become a co-educational Gaelcholaiste.
It was roundly welcomed as something to celebrate, most notably by Education Minister Norma Foley who described it as: “great news for the school and the local community.”
Is it though? And how would Foley know? She described the proudly Dublin 8 school as “in the heart of Dublin 2”, so it seems she doesn’t know the first thing about the area. As a parent of a student in the school, I was disappointed to hear it’s going all-Irish. At what cost?
It’s great it’ll be co-educational because it’s perverse madness how many schools remain boys-only or girls-only in modern Ireland. But I’m not a fan of gaelscoils for the same reason - because they divide. They result in segregation based on social status.
Of course, it’s great to promote the Irish language, but there’s a side dish of elitism and exclusivity to gaelscoils I’m not comfortable with. Pride in our national language to the point of educating your kids in it is still largely a choice of the middle-class Irish parent. What will inevitably happen to Synge Street when it goes all-Irish is that it will lose most of those students who are new to Ireland, from countries all over the world.
One of the best things about the school at the moment is its multi-culturalism, with a high percentage of students whose parents came here from all over the world to work, live and make a life here. Every class has boys with Dublin accents whose families are immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. How many of those parents would want their children learning exclusively as gaeilge? Not too many, and you can't blame them.
Another cohort of Synger - which is a DEIS school - are disadvantaged inner-city kids. By changing to a gaelscoil, Synge Street will exchange these students for the affluent sons and daughters of gentrification. Minister Foley noted the demand for a Gaelcholaiste in south Dublin city.
Where will the current demographic go to secondary school, when it switches over to being a school for the niche who want to learn exclusively through Irish? There's about 300 pupils in the school currently. With no word of a suitable school for them in the future, this is pulling the rug from under them.
Synge Street has been a part of our family life - both primary and secondary - for nearly a decade. It’s an excellent school that manages hundreds of boys with impressive ease, with great teachers and a deserved reputation as a good place to be educated.
But that reputation and respect is partly to do with how this hard-knock inner-city school educated inclusively across the classes, from Gay Byrne to Gabriel Byrne, James Plunkett and John Connolly, up to Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave.
Turning into a gaelcholaiste means it will lose that.
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