Catholics Dominated Education in Ireland since Famine

"The overwhelming control of the primary education system that the Catholic Church has held since the Famine results not from charity but from the exercise of power, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE [Irish Times, Sat 6 June 2009]...

...The great myth that hangs over so much discussion of the Catholic Church’s domination of the education and health systems is that the church stepped in to offer services that the State refused to provide. Had it not been for the church, the story goes, the plain people of Ireland would have been left without schools or medical services...

...After the Famine, however, the Catholic Church began to recreate itself as an institutional structure with power over the civil and intimate lives of the majority of the population. As part of that process, it set about destroying the national schools and replacing them with a specifically Catholic system. Its leader, Cardinal Paul Cullen, declared the national school system to be “very dangerous when considered in general because its aim is to introduce a mingling of Protestants and Catholics.”...'

Full article is at: Lessons in the power of the church - The Irish Times - Sat, Jun 06, 2009