Maynooth’s Secular Seminary Takes Aim at Inner City Schooling

The pampered prats of Maynooth University and RTÉ are at it again. This time, the focus of their ire is on central Dublin. 

An American academic, “an interdisciplinary scholar whose historical interests intersect with interests in architecture, the built environment and cities; art and material culture” whom Maynooth Secular Seminary employs for its own peculiar reasons, informs us that central Dublin is being discriminated against because some schools there retain a Christian and specifically Catholic ethos and, worse still, some of them are single sex only and thus, according to this American academic Maynooth Secular Seminary employs, “highly segregated”. A state of affairs JoAnne Mancini, the itinerant American academic in question, finds highly offensive to how she believes Ireland must be controlled.

Mancini believes that denying the parts of central Dublin she chooses to champion the type of schools she champions ”may be linked to other inequalities experienced by Dublin’s teenagers, with children in areas of low and segregated school provision spending a disproportionately large share of their time travelling to school compared to children in areas of higher state investment.”

Mancini complains that the “educational landscape remains highly segregated” in Ireland, not only with regard to “the provision of inclusive (i.e. not segregated) post-primary facilities that is unequal, but the provision of post-primary education more generally”.

The solution, it seems, would be to have trans friendly schools supplant those in North Ruthland St, North William Street, North King Street and, presumably, the private schools of Blackrock, Booterstown and Belvedere to be levelled so that the Irish educational system can be remodelled in the image that she and her RTE collaborators demand.

RTE’s moanfest centres around Rosie, an obviously disturbed child from a dysfunctional family, who must travel 6 kms every day to a non denominational school in Sandymount because the Anglican, Methodist, Jewish and Catholic schools that are much nearer to her (state subsidised?) homes are offensive to her demands for “inclusivity” and boys, as well as girls, on tap.

Former Fianna Fáil boss Seán Lemass and Communist Party of Ireland boss Mick O’Riordan both lived on the South Circular Road. Seán trucked across town to the O’Connell’s CBS school in North William Street and Mick sent his son, Manus, to the nearby Synge Street CBS, which also schooled Gay Byrne and generations of non-Catholics. 

If they had no problem with it, why should some itinerant American academic, unless she and her employers have a nefarious agenda?

In their day, inner city schools like O’Connell’s and Synge St were as good as anything Blackrock, Terenure or St Stephen’s Green, which was home to many schools for all tastes and wallets, produced, and the Brothers who manned those schools made the best out of the little they had. And, though the Brothers may be gone, their spirit of scratching through remains, as a journey to Tara Street baths on any school day morning would show.

For it is there that Catholic, Anglican, Muslim and Hindu children, who go to those Micky Mudd and Paddy Stink Anglican and Catholic schools of central Dublin learn to swim as part of a skill set that is much more beneficial than anything an itinerant American academic, “an interdisciplinary scholar whose historical interests intersect with interests in architecture, the built environment and cities; art and material culture” might chance to teach Maynooth Secular Seminary’s unfortunate charges.

The Leaving Cert, which O’Connell’s and Synge Street once excelled at acing, has been devalued beyond measure, and, though all of the blame for its demise cannot be laid at the doors of the empty vessels of either Maynooth Secular Seminary or RTÉ, they must take their share of the blame for the ongoing destruction of Irish education in particular and Irish civil society in general.

Ireland’s educational system needs reform and nowhere more so than at Maynooth Seminary, whose students are not only fleeced with high rents and higher fees but with being forced to learn fairy tales about inner city Dublin from an American itinerant lecturer, who has nothing beyond her own American biases and the indulgence of RTÉ to offer them.