Being a southern Protestant has never been more popular.
According to the latest census figures, the Protestant population in the Republic is rising for the first time since the 19th century. Not only has the last few years seen an increase in the Protestant population, but there are many Catholic parents enrolling their children in Protestant schools.
The rise is being caused by a mixture of conversion, immigration, re-migration of locals who left in the 1980s, and the fact that more children of mixed marriages are being brought up as Protestants.
In the past, the local Protestant national school would have found it difficult to fill classes - today, the issue is where to put everybody. For example, I know of a Dublin Protestant national school that has a demand problem because it‘s too popular! The same thing is probably facing many Protestant national schools all over the country. The most interesting outcome is the increase in Catholic parents registering their children in Protestant schools.
One reason is supply-driven. According to recent reports, there has been a huge increase in the number of students going to private schools. Long gone are the traditional non-fee-paying schools that once formed the backbone of the Irish secondary school system.
The phenomenon is not limited to Dublin. Last year, another long-standing non-fee-paying institution, Belcamp College, was sold off. after struggling for years to maintain student numbers. And in Dun Laoghaire the Christian Brothers School closed down, leaving just one school in the principal town of Ireland’s sixth-largest constituency.
The Department of Education has revealed that hundreds of places are unfilled in free education schools in the Dublin area. There are 13,000 unfilled places in north Dublin schools alone. Why is this happening and what are the long-term implications?
Put bluntly, the easiest answer could be that since the “Celtic Tiger” snobbery has ruled the roost. Schools that were good enough for our forebears are no longer good enough for us. Trading up and having it all are the underlying characteristics. An increasing gap between the very rich and the poor is the outcome. Middle-class parents are aware that the difference between material success and failure is growing. Every decision they take on behalf of their children is considerably more loaded than it used to be. Nowhere is this more evident than in schooling, because the demand for education is rising and as the supply of traditionally expensive schools can’t increase, the fees rise instead.
This is having an amplified impact on the Protestant schools in particular. As a result of the traditional position of Protestants in the middle class, Protestant schools are over-represented among the ranks of middle-class schools in Dublin.
Because of the feeder school system from primary to secondary schools, Catholic parents must send their children to private Protestant primary schools to guarantee their place in the ‘right’ secondary school. This has the effect of pushing the fees in those primary schools higher.
As a reaction to the increase in price, ‘ethnic’ Protestants – who typically would have gone to these schools, but might today have more modest salaries than their Catholic neighbours – are opting to send their children to free Church of Ireland schools instead.
But there is something else happening. In the age of abundance that Ireland is experiencing, money alone no longer marks people out. Wealthy people are trying to find ways to distinguish themselves from their counterparts, rather than being merely rich, they want to be posh.
No matter how you look at it, southern Protestants were always posh, now rich Catholic parents are trying to mark out the distinctiveness of their children by sending them to the more rarefied Protestant schools.
It takes a bit of work though, in the extreme, they have to swap sides or, at the very least, nod in that general direction. People who haven’t been to Mass for years suddenly turn up in Protestant churches.
They very often are the people who commandeer the stalls at the summer fete or take the Brownies enthusiastically up the Sugarloaf. With the zeal of converts, they out-Protestant the Protestants. This creates a problem for the rector. He has to decide who is sufficiently Protestant and who is not, and who gets into the national school. Does he reject the children of the newly observant wannabe Protestants in favour of those of the totally atheist ‘ethnic’ Protestants or second-guess motives and distinguish between the anthropologically-driven snobs and the economically-savvy new realists?
