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Governing ‘authentic’ religiosity? The responsibilisation of parents beyond

Religion and State in matters of school ethos in Ireland

Karl Kitching Irish Journal of Sociology (forthcoming 2014)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to advance scholarship on the governance of religious difference and its relationship to social reproduction, inclusion and exclusion, with specific reference to parenting, schooling and childhood. Rather ask ‘how does the State and Religion govern religious pursuits?’, the focus of this paper is ‘how might parents’ and children’s religious expressions be already implicated, or caught up in, the ordering and co-ordination of complex social systems?’ Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I analyse how the political rationalities of freedom of choice and diversity are deployed through media discourse. The paper traces an iterative process of producing a symbolically ‘new’ national space, which re-legitimises State (and more ‘discerning’ school patron) power in a marketised, global age. It argues that ‘Irish’ parents are evaluated in this imagined space in terms of their capacity to combine consumption and religious practices responsibly and authentically. In its implicit citation and elision of generational, classed, and racialised hierarchies, the mediated, moral governance of responsible religious and ethical subjects, expressions and practices becomes clear. The paper concludes by noting the potential contribution of governmentality thinking to contemporary debates on religious and secular governance.

Key words: religion, governance, education, parenthood, childhood, media, Ireland

Introduction

The Republic of Ireland has long been represented in literary and scholarly accounts

as the ‘most Catholic’ of English-speaking countriesi. However, a steep decline in

Roman Catholic institutional observance, a rise in female labour market participation,

diversification beyond the traditional nuclear family form and ‘glocalization’ have de-

stabilised the theocentrism of Irish social institutions such as education, healthcare

and the family, particularly since the 1980s (Inglis 2007; O’Connor 2008). Ireland is

by no means unique in having to negotiate such late modern cultural currents.

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However, its particular experience in childhood is unique, not least because the Irish

primary school system remains quite unusual in the Anglophone world. Ninety-one

per cent of primary schools funded by the state are under Catholic patronageii. A

much-debated exemption in Ireland’s Equal Status Acts allows a denominational

school to refuse the enrolment of children who may not identify with the school’s

ethos, ‘provided it can prove that this refusal is essential to maintain the ethos of the

school’ (Equality Authority and Department of Education and Science [DES] 2004:

14).

The aim of this paper is to advance scholarship on the governance of religious

difference and its relationship to social reproduction, inclusion and exclusion,

specifically in relation to parenting, schooling and childhood. This is an

underdeveloped field internationally (Cooey 2010), as indeed is the contribution of

governmentality thinking to questions of Church, or (more appropriately from a

multi-faith perspective), Religion and State (Garmany 2010). Section one reviews the

relevant Irish and international scholarship on religious multiplicity and its

intersectionality with, or embeddedness in, capitalist nationed and racialised social

relations. It is suggested from this complex picture that we must avoid the Eurocentric

(Christian Protestant) tendency to reduce parent, but also child religious identification

to a matter of decontextualised, individual, passive receipt of ‘belief’ or ‘non-belief’

(Inglis 2007). The intersectionality of religious identity with race, national, class and

gender identity also reminds that rather than assume a singular child (or parent)

subject who is either educationally liberated or repressed solely on the basis of

religious or ethical worldview, the multiple hierarchical social relations through

which religious and ethical expressions are made possible, necessary or impossible in

particular places must be borne in mind.

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Section two analyses some of the prominent ways of conceptualising the

governance of religious pursuits in the modern nation-state and public sphere, both for

children and parents. Given the contingency of what might be categorised as religious

and non-religious identity (discussed in section one), the protection and regulation of

religious expression is a complex issue, not least in the education sector. Drawing on

Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue here that, rather than pose the question

in terms of ‘how the state should govern religious pursuits’, our focus in a globalised

world might be ‘how might religious expression be already implicated, or caught up,

in the ordering and co-ordination of complex social systems?’ Communications media

are argued to be important producers of governmentalities that are not reducible to the

State, or denominational schools as reified spaces, or sources of social control. In fact,

the circulating nature of control through such spaces can mask itself via (media)

discursive processes that reify the State as the sovereign enabler of (parental)

‘freedom of choice’ and ‘diversity’.

In section three, through a discourse analysis of how the political rationalities of

freedom of choice and diversity circulate, I demonstrate how the dual process of

producing a modern ‘Irish’ nation and legitimating State and patron power is

mediated. I demonstrate how ‘Irish’ parent and child citizens are evaluated in this

imagined space in terms of their capacity to be ‘responsibly’ religious or non-

religious. I argue this process erases consumerist, classed, and racialised hierarchies

through which religious and non-religious spaces, subjects, expressions and practices

may emerge. This argument adds to broader philosophical debates over whether ‘we’

exist in a secular or post-secular age (Asad 2003; Habermas 2006; Beckford 2012).

!The multiplicity of religious identifications, and the power dynamics of belief

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In the 2011 Census, 84 per cent of people in Ireland identified as Roman Catholic

(CSO, 2012). Inglis’ (2007) analysis of both the 1999 European Values Survey (EVS)

and his qualitative project, Contemporary Irish Identities, suggests that both personal

belief and institutional belonging remain important features of Irish Catholicism.

However, he also argues that Catholics ‘not only pick and choose which institutional

rules, beliefs, and practices they prefer’, but they may ‘mix these with ingredients

from other religious traditions’ (2007: 205). This includes, for example, a decline in

belief in heaven and hell (transcendence), and a greater emphasis placed on shared,

collective memory and heritage (immanence). This analysis provides a context in

which we can understand the continued importance of family and community events

such as First Holy Communion (Kitching 2014). It echoes the adaptivity of such

events to consumption-led societies internationally, where strict definitions of what is

secular and sacred are no longer centrally (institutionally) controlled, but subject to

family and personal revision and local contestation. For instance, McGrail’s (2007)

study demonstrates the conflict between clergy in Liverpool and certain working class

families in terms of how they celebrate Communion.

Of course, diverse religiosity in Ireland exists not only amongst those

identifying as Catholic; it also refers to the range of identifications between and

outside religious groupings. Between 1991 and 2011, the fastest growing religion in

percentage terms has been Orthodox, followed by Apostolic and Pentecostal religions.

At over a quarter of a million people, those identifying with ‘no religion’ constitute

the second largest group in the 2011 Census (Central Statistics Office 2012). There is

also increased heterogeneity in how religious group membership is lived

transnationally which is not necessarily captured by surveys of ‘national’ religiosity.

People may be connected to and form the basis of religious institutions and cultures

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that could be described as transnational or trans-local, rather than nationally bounded.

Shanneik’s (2012) research with Algerian Salafi-Muslim women in Dublin also

shows how diasporic groups can be actively involved in the geographic re-definition

of local Muslim religiosities. These women define themselves as belonging to a

purified, global imagined Islamic community - al-ummah al-islamiyya, while

deploying a Front Isamique du Salut construction of rural, lower-income Algerians as

struggling against imperial Christian Europeans, including the Irish.

The potential deployment of religious beliefs and practices as part of local and

ethno-racial boundary-making is clear from Shanneik’s (2012) work. These particular

women adopt ‘a position of religious and moral superiority’ in relation to imperial

Europe, justifying it with ‘eschatological connotations of reward and punishment in

the afterlife’ (Shanneik 2012: 87-88). They send their children to a Catholic school

instead of a Muslim school, as a means of keeping them away from the influence of

the latter’s largely non-Muslim staff. Emphasising the continued symbolic domination

of Catholic institutions in Irish education (Inglis 2007), they see Catholicism, rather

than secularism, as a predominant ‘threat’ to their children’s identity at school. Yet

their attendance at a Catholic school purportedly helps them to construct clear

distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the same time, they are not eager to go back

to Algeria because the situation there is ‘not Islamic enough’ in terms of what they

see as the erosion of the language of the Quran - classical Arabic or fusha - which is

taught in the children’s after-school classes. Likewise, Ugba’s (2006) research

demonstrates some of the different cultural and economic complexities of diasporic

belief and belonging that exist in relation to Pentecostal, diasporic African-led groups

in Dublin.

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The heterogeneity of religious identifications amongst children and young

people themselves has become a quickly growing research focus in recent years. Such

work questions the presentation of children as passive, uniform recipients of religious

knowledge and/or socialisation (Smith 2005; REMC 2008; Hopkins et al. 2011).

Smith’s (2005) research in British primary schools demonstrated the diversity of

believing and belonging within and across child religious groups, where some

children may focus on beliefs, and others focus on rituals and events. I have noted

similar phenomena amongst children in Ireland as part of the Making Communion

study (Kitching 2014). Furthermore, the cross-European Religious Education in

Multicultural Contexts (REMC) study data stated the 7-12 year olds interviewed

‘indicated complex engagement with religious beliefs and practices…which could not

be easily reduced to formal religious categories. Children’s religious identity also

emerged as fluid’ (REMC 2008: 40). They could hold different religious views from

their parents, or even when similar to parents, a more personalised set of meanings

could be evoked. However, the Irish data also suggests that the younger the child, the

more likely the parents were to expect higher levels of conformity to the religion from

them, ‘to provide them with a religious grounding from which they could develop

their own religious outlook in later life’ (2008: 39).

The expression of child religiosity through other social identities

Hemming and Madge (2012) note that ‘religious identity will be structured through

other social identities and subject to negotiation, across a range of social spaces, at

different times throughout the life-course’ (2012: 40). The preceding discussion has

already implied ways that religious expression, and ‘ascribed’ social identities such as

generation (childhood), race and linguistic identity can interplay in specific spaces.

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Hemming and Madge’s (2012) review notes that the majority of research on religion,

childhood and other social identities has focused on ethnicity and gender, with social

class, disability and sexuality being less emphasised. However, there is considerable

evidence of how social class intersects with religion and/or ethos in Irish schools,

through the mobilisation of social and cultural capital (REMC 2008; Devine 2009).

Examining data across 15 countries from the Programme for International Student

Assessment (PISA), the REMC team (2008) notes that Ireland belongs to a cluster of

countries including Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland,

Germany, Luxembourg, and Sweden, where opting for private state-funded (faith)

schools is more based on their middle class social composition and enhanced

resources than on specific faith identity. Their qualitative research in Ireland

suggested proximity of the school to home as the pre-eminent factor in the vast

majority of parents’ ‘choice’ processes. Importantly, they note the (un)availability of

different school types as an important influence on this as a priority.

The cultural and political geographies of available and unavailable,

denominational and multidenominational schools is classed and racialised. For

example, migrant children in Ireland are overrepresented in non-Catholic, urban and

disadvantaged primary schools in Ireland, as an effect of limited school places in

urban areas, and greater competition between these schools (Byrne, McGinnity,

Smyth and Darmody 2010). Children are not passive in these dynamic social

processes. For instance, Devine (2009) documents the ways migrant children and

families in Ireland – who may be more vulnerable to economic downturns in terms of

further racialisation - develop social and cultural capital through ‘Arabic’ weekend

schooling and Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Devine (2009) notes how certain

children may overtly contribute to the process of family ‘capital accumulation’ in

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education by acting as interpreters for parents, a practice which somewhat subverts

the traditional intergenerational ordering of home-school and adult-child

relationships.

Thus, far from necessarily choosing to be/not be religious, both adults and

children may place differential emphases on affiliation, belonging, beliefs,

behaviours, practices and religious and spiritual experiences in different times and

places (Hemming and Madge 2012). The varieties of ways of ‘believing’ and/or

‘belonging’ underlines that any singular notion of ‘authentic’, ‘truly’, ‘or ‘really’

religious subject must be viewed with caution. Both adults’ and children’s religious

identifications are situated in, and may be articulated through political, economic,

cultural and geographical circumstances. The increased flows of money, people,

ideas, images and technologies that characterise globalisation not only suggest an

increased multiplicity in how religious identifications are lived within and across

institutions and societies; it requires further, alternative ways of thinking about how

religious identities and spaces are socially reproduced and/or formally and informally

governed and regulated.

!The governance of ‘authentic’ conscience: beyond the Religion/State dichotomy

The influence of organised Christian religions, and particularly the Catholic Church,

on the governance of public institutions in modern Ireland has been well documented

(Inglis 1987, 2007; Maguire 2009). In one sense, this literature pre-empts the

scholarly popularisation of Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which is used to

examine regimes of power that operate beyond a reified state apparatus. As Garmany

notes, ‘religion and churches also produce and maintain the knowledges, truths, and

social order associated with governmentality and self-regulated governance’

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(Garmany 2010: 908).

Before delving further into the scholarship on governmentality, it is important

to point out that any simplistic notion of universally advancing secularisation, where

all religious institutions become functionally differentiated from other social

institutions, has long been called into question by sociologists and political

philosophers. Jürgen Habermas introduced the concept of post-secularism as a means

of understanding the purported ‘return’ of religion, or the existence of religious

communities, in a purportedly secularising region such as Europe. Moving beyond the

argument that such communities evidence counter-secularisation (i.e., the reactionary

fundamentalising of religious groups), Habermas usefully calls for a re-thinking of the

automatic authority given to positivist and empiricist rationality as the basis for

governance in contemporary societies, arguing that the basic presumptions of what

are assumed ‘scientific’ and ‘metaphysical’ need to be re-evaluated.

The notion of governmentality may take up Habermas’ (2006) call for re-

evaluation in an unforeseen way, by highlighting that technologies of governance can

in fact operate outside centralised institutional power, whether Religion or State-

based. For example, Habermas uses a quasi-scientific metaphor to herald the ‘return’

of religious communities, thus failing to consider it to be a discursive practice,

inextricable from relations of power, whereby ‘Europe’ is periodised and marked as

essentially separate from other regions from where religion ‘returns’. Such discursive

practices are frequently mobilised as a form of racialised governance in a post 9/11

era (Lentin and Titley 2011). It works by dehistoricising and occluding modes of

regulation that are distinctively different from that which is described as sovereign

(Western) government.

Representations of Religion and State as government, i.e., separate, centralised

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sources of power, continuously work to occlude governmentality. Through this latter

concept, Foucault historicises specific modes and rationalities of power, showing that

neither Religion nor State can be satisfactorily described as entirely centralized, or

reified power loci. No history of modernity can unilaterally describe modern States or

Religions as preceding or acting ‘on’ the other. As Rose (1996) argues,

The 'power of the State' is a resultant, not a cause, an outcome of the

composing and assembling of actors, flows, buildings, relations of authority

into relatively durable associations mobilized, to a greater or lesser extent,

towards the achievement of particular objectives by common means (Rose

1996: 43).

Both State and Religion are ‘relatively durable associations…of persons, places and

activities’ (Rose 1996: 43). Garmany (2010) argues they are ‘not sources of

governmentality but rather the effects of ‘governmentalized’ practices, institutions,

knowledges, procedures, etc.’ (Garmany 2010: 910). Particularly in an age of less

stable local-global economic and cultural interaction, institutions are enmeshed in an

ensemble of procedures, analyses, reflections and series of knowledges, whose

governing power, or capacity to produce subjects, is not in the last instance centrally

located.

The production of dually authentic and responsible selfhood as governance

Foucault’s analysis of pastoral or ‘caring’ power demonstrates it to be a key

underlying feature of governmentality in a neo-liberal age (Foucault 1979; Garmany

2010). Pastoral power involves the key technique of individualisation, which happens

by establishing within the individual a particular relation of truth to him/herself.

Foucault refers to this as the ‘government of individuals by their own verity’ (1979:

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240). Pastoral power produces, rather than coerces, individuals, not least through the

disciplining of bodies into being self-regulating, responsibilised subjects. Through

this process, institutional space comes to be governed and its boundaries defined

through self-regulating practices; political, ethical and spiritual power is manifest

already through the possibility of being a particular kind of subject. It works through

people’s bodily acts, and the legitimating of ways of conducting conduct, as opposed

to being something people necessarily consciously consent to. Notably, in the Irish

context, the construction of a defined, bounded institutional ethos outside of the

denominational school model and rational self-interest are not discursively

incommensurable. O’Sullivan (2005) notes in relation to the emergence of the

multidenominational Educate Together school movement that

The mercantile emphasis on choice and diversity in the provision of services in

line with the expressed wishes of consumers is totally consistent with the

assertion of difference in the realm of religious sentiments (O’Sullivan 2005:

201).

The much smaller number of multidenominational (Educate Together) and minority

faith schools in Ireland has been found to more likely cater for children from more

middle class backgrounds, and ‘actively choosing’ parents than Catholic schools

(Darmody, Smyth and McCoy 2012). The production of such (middle class) subjects

and their particular behaviours is possible ‘because its logic is inseparable from

‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’’ that circulates, e.g., in expertise on how to combine

religious/ethical and consumer identities appropriately (Garmany 2010: 909).

It would be contradictory on my part, however, to return to structuralist,

singular models of power that essentialise the Educate Together ‘ethos’ as having a

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hidden curriculum of middle class-ness. Catholic schools have lower percentages of

minority ethnic populations than Educate Together schools, but similarly, this does

not imply we should categorise Catholic schools as ‘more’ nationally/racially

bounded (Darmody, Smyth and McCoy 2012). The essentialist production of such

knowledge/statistical averages about different school patrons is part of

governmentalities, which elide and dehistoricise the uneven, local interplay of race

and class in how ethos is lived. It is important not just to avoid reifying school ethos,

but also to understand that everyday subjects, as suggested by section one, are

iteratively produced through dynamic intersections of religion, race and class. This

understanding helps avoid ontologising race, class or religion as effectively natural,

pre-existing identities.

Progressing the critique of State neutrality: beyond a reified State

Governmentality studies thus critique the understanding of ‘secular

governance’ espoused in the liberal state paradigm, where political power is centrally

located, and operates separately from spiritual and ethical power. Returning to

Habermas (2006), what is most revealing in his argument for a post-secular age are

his discursive practices; particularly regarding what ‘is to be done’ to ‘manage’

secular-religious relations. While Habermas recognises that the ethics of the

democratic state have a Christian legacy, his idealised split in the imagined public

sphere ‘between citizenship and national identity…neglects religion’s role in

establishing the cultural ground of that citizenship’ (Friedland 1999: 127). Outside of

governmentality studies, international scholarship has long established that a given

construction of secular nation-statehood, very much relates to the particular religious

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culture or legacy of particular contexts (Modood and Kastoryano 2006). The most

typically critiqued secular-civic example in the western European education context is

the French Republic, where the removal of all religious symbols from schools fails to

recognise the significance of such symbols for, e.g. the racialised, hijab-wearing girl

as she moves between spaces that are constituted as private (home) and public

(school) (Hogan 2005; Lentin and Titley 2011).

Another critique of State ‘neutrality’ has been posed by Cooey (2010) in

relation to children’s religious identities. Cooey (2010) suggests that in the US

context a fundamental contradiction occurs in legal rulings, where the wishes of

parents who refuse blood transfusions for their child on religious grounds are not

respected. She suggests this contradiction occurs because such rulings typically view

children as incapable of religious agency:

The child’s neutrality is actually its imposed secularity, its value that of a

potential adult who may one day choose religiosity, largely understood as

holding to a belief, a set of beliefs, or a worldview; for the moment the

child can be considered only in terms of preserving its materiality, often

of secondary importance to its religious community (Cooey 2010: 12)

Certainly, the Irish State apparatus can continue to be regarded as non-neutral in its

comparatively weak efforts to divest primary schools from the Catholic Church (Daly

and Hickey 2011). But returning to governmentality thinking, it is not enough to

argue that particular states are not neutral when it comes to religious minorities and/or

children. Such an argument has its place, but alone will return us to endlessly

debating the legitimate use of a power that acts ‘on’ subjects. This predetermines ‘the

State’, ‘the child’ ‘the market’ and ‘Religion’ in the analysis as instances of power’s

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presence and lack, as if they pre-existed heterogeneous social relations. It requires the

posing of the ‘truth’ of the subject’s relationship to power in singular terms as

religious/non-religious, or as agentic/passive. Again, as noted earlier, it thus erases the

lived, intersectional dynamics through which religious expressions are situated and

produced.

Reframing the question of religious governance: mediated ‘choice’ and ‘diversity’

The contribution of governmentality thinking is to reveal modalities of power and

control that are more complex and hidden than the singular notion of religious power

as ‘possessed’ or ‘lacking’ allows. Viewing the discursive and material as

dynamically enmeshed, it demonstrates how decentred forms of power work through

an ensemble of practices, institutions, knowledges, procedures, analyses and subjects.

In the forthcoming analysis, I focus on a non-traditional domain - communications

media - where a repertoire of discourses iteratively work by persuasively citing

institutions, knowledges and subjects in ways that present the normal, legitimate child

subject of religion, via their parents, as involved in appropriate acts of local school

consumption and production.

The significance of communications media as the contemporary ‘moral

watchdog’ of Irish society is underlined by Donnelly and Inglis (2010). Theirs is the

first paper to demonstrate key decreases and accruals in the symbolic power of Irish

Catholic and media institutions, respectively. They assert the occurrence of ‘Irish’

secularisation through the media by demonstrating its interventions on, and

questioning of, Catholic dominance. But we can attend to the significance of media

discourse to the production of responsibilised parents and children without reifying

‘Media’ as a centralised, unitary source of power. The discursive, regulatory practices

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of both media and schools are understood here as aligning in specific ways, rather

than being separate, reified power bases. Governance is understood here as mediated

through the possibility of particular types of subjects and ways of knowing being

persuasively cited and circulated.

While political power is recognised as decentred, it is important to recognise

that particular political programmes are translated through these means (Rose, 1996).

The analyses below consider how the political rationalities of freedom of choice and

diversity index ways that responsible, and authentic (and by implication, irresponsible

and inauthentic) parent and child religious subjects of the nation are constructed. The

question, ‘how does the state govern religious expression?’, suggests that individual

religious identity pre-exists the normalising techniques, procedures and knowledges

that produce one’s relationship to oneself. Moves beyond the singular religious

subject, and notions of centralised (Religious, State, Media) power, imply a

methodological move away from the question of how does the State govern parent

and child religiosity? The methodological focus becomes ‘how might parents’ and

children’s religious expressions and practices – and the definition of same - be already

implicated, or caught up, in the ordering and co-ordination of complex and

hierarchical social systems?’

The production and circulation of the rationality of freedom of (parent) choice

and diversity are argued below to form part of a neo-liberal process of both putting

symbolic order on the ‘new Irish’ nation and of responsibilising parents locally. This

re-constitution of nationhood is necessary to justify both State, and patronage

(particularly Catholic Church and Educate Together) power given the recent years of

intense globalisation, Europeanisation, a Northern peace process, immigration,

religious multiplicities and revelations of child sexual abuse. The process of state

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reconstruction has been highly explicit since the election of the Fine Gael-Labour

government in March 2011 (O’Leary 2012). This government has been sharply

focused on gaining public sector efficiencies amidst a sovereign debt crisis. The

‘cost-neutral’, post-welfare nature in which Minister of Education Ruairí Quinn’s

national Forum on Primary School Patronage and Pluralism (Coolahan, Hussey and

Kilfeather 2012) has been framed is thus part of this narrative.

It is clear in the data that freedom of choice in particular is deployed as a

technology of differentiation that re-centres the ‘Irish’ parent (and not their child/ren)

as s/he who is required to be repressed/emancipated by the presence of categorical

religious/ethical ethos. Notions of ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘diversity’ are mobilised to

elide adult-centred, classed and racialised social hierarchies, allowing the governance

of responsible religious and non-religious child subjects, expressions and practices to

circulate.

‘New’ Ireland? Responsibilising parents to ‘opt in’ to local school ethos

The Irish constitutional principle of educational subsidiarity involves the Irish state

only ever indirectly ‘providing’ primary education. It does so by funding those groups

and associations who wish to set up schools. This ‘freedom of conscience’ clause

emerged from a colonial context where the Catholic hierarchy was gaining leverage.

It served to reflect this church’s consolidation of its control over public schools and,

in particular, poorer families and children in the independent state. But participation

in ‘new’ Ireland’s school system has become increasingly recast in the marketised

discourse of personalised parent choice (Lynch and Moran 2006). This attempted

move away from the unquestioned, officially unregulated status quo, or ‘Catholic

habitus’ of schools (Inglis 2007), through the more managerial circulation of

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knowledge helps rationalise the legitimacy of State, Catholic Church and,

increasingly, Educate Together’s governing power ‘over’ local schools.

It is first worth noting that much of the media discourse around changes to

school patronage was not led by politicians. One of the most cited public

commentators on school patronage, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin,

has arguably been ahead of politicians in his recasting of affiliation to the nation in

terms of authentic, personal ‘choice’ of spiritual and/or ethical direction. In a 2007

address to the Inaugural Irish Institute of New York entitled ‘New Ireland, New

Church’, Dr. Martin emphasises that a new Church can lead this new, globalised

Ireland, rather than the other way around, and that it already does so in terms of

supporting primary and secondary education. While drawing distinctions between

Catholic and market values, he suggests that they can be combined in quite literally

happy ways to forge New Ireland. He celebrates the 2004 suggestion in the Economist

magazine that Ireland is a ‘happy’ population because it has successfully combined

the most desirable elements of ‘new’ economic growth with ‘old’ traditions such as

family life and ‘volunteerism’. He celebrates an increasingly pluralist Ireland and

notes that in a visit to Dublin mosques, ‘many parents thanked me for the ethos of our

Catholic schools which, as one man said, ‘allowed my children to become Muslims’’

(Martin 2011: 89).

While likely referring to the constitutional right to establish Muslim schools that

came from ‘freedom of conscience’ in early independent Ireland, there is irony to this

statement in terms of the possibility with which, at local level, certain Muslims may

attend a Catholic school in order to segregate, and enhance their sense of religious

and ethno-racial difference (Shanneik 2012). Yet diversity has been mobilised as a

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positional good by both patrons and politicians in order to responsibilise parents to

‘opt in’ to their local school ethos. Drawing a temporal distinction between the old

Ireland of unquestioned Catholic habitus and the contemporary ‘national’ need to

attend to difference, diversity is repeatedly used to standardise and be explicit about

what is distinctively ‘offered’ by different primary schools patrons in new Ireland. Dr.

Martin has called for school patronage diversity in the form of a national roundtable

on the future management of schools since 2007 (Flynn 2008). Four years later, but

only 48 hours after his appointment as Minister for Education and Skills, Ruairí

Quinn TD, announced that he would be ‘pressing on with’ the establishment of a

Forum on School Patronage

As an immediate priority. The focus of the forum will be on identifying

the methods and processes by which schools can be transferred from

Catholic patronage in order to create greater diversity and choice (Quinn

2011).

Diversity is repeatedly ‘captured’ or cited in these statements as an object which adds

to the primarily economic, but also social and cultural value of a brave new society.

The managerialist framing of diversity in education policy typically occludes social

class as a marker of difference (Kitching 2014a). An exception to this is Dr. Martin’s

critique of middle class parents who send their children to Catholic second level

schools to ‘avoid diversity’ (McGarry 2008). The Educate Together Charter also very

obliquely refers to ‘social’ background as a form of difference (Educate Together

2004). More typically, the discourse of diversity refers to Other(ed) social identities

(religious and ethno-racial), and school identities (in terms of ethos), as fixed and

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essential objects to be possessed, rather than negotiated, potentially ambiguous

knowledges and subject positions (Ahmed 2012).

The standardised ‘methods and processes’ (Quinn 2011) identified by the

Forum located the issue of divesting schools primarily ‘within’ families and their

freedom to choose. Parents were surveyed locally on their ‘preference’ of patron in a

total of 44 areas, symbolically investing parent power, via the state, to transform

school localities. While children and young people’s views were taken into

consideration in the Forum report, they were not surveyed on the material process of

divesting schools (Coolahan, Hussey and Kilfeather 2012). ‘Diversity’ was presented

to parents in the requirement placed on school patrons to write a succinct description

of their ethos. Through the act of completing the survey, parents become responsible

for the consumption and production of local school diversity and/or homogeneity, i.e.,

by indicating the ‘level of parental demand for a wider choice’ (DES 2013: 3).

The average response rate to the survey was 19 per cent. In 23 of the 38 areas

surveyed in the post-pilot questionnaire, a level of demand for ‘wider choice’ that was

designated as prompt immediate action was articulated; 22 of these were to be

multidenominational, and one was to be Irish medium (DES 2013). The response by

Educate Together emphasised its ‘delight’

That so many parents across the country want an Educate Together school in

their community. The Forum for Patronage and Pluralism has given parents

in these communities the opportunity to express preference for the schools

they want. We are honoured that so many communities have put their trust

in Educate Together and our educational ethos (Educate Together 2013).

On the other hand, the Catholic Schools Partnership released a statement that

welcomed the measurement instrument, and stated that the surveys ‘provide a notable

20

affirmation of Catholic schools’. However, they focused significantly on their

disappointment that more parents were not exercised by the survey, i.e., that they did

not act their responsible place in the discourse of ‘freedom of conscience’. According

to McGarry (2013), Dr. Martin has asked what parents, who have expressed through

the survey that they do not want to divest Catholic schools to the State, actually mean.

He stated:

Communities ‘should be more radically honest with themselves as to what

they want. I don’t want Catholic schools-lite.’ If people wanted ‘their child

to go to a Catholic school because then they can make their First

Communion, and then leave…a lot more debate has to go on.’ (McGarry

2013).

Here, we see the discourse of freedom of choice becoming an instrument of

problematisation, which differentiates between authentically and inauthentically

Catholic families in ‘New Ireland’ (Martin 2011). It suggests the necessity for parents

to self-responsibilise, and to either contribute to a more ‘perfect’, modern set of

Catholic schools, or ‘opt out’ (O’Sullivan 2005).

Space does not permit a fuller discussion of the manner in which the conduct

of Catholic sacraments such as First Holy Communion have been persistently subject

to racialised and classed moral panics. The religious authenticity and cultural ‘tastes’

of child, Traveller and working class groups have been particularly targeted since the

airing of the voyeuristic British ‘reality’ documentary My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding

(Jensen and Ringrose 2013). However, this process of self-responsibilisation, of

consciously ‘opting in’ to an essential religious or other school ethos has circulated in

the impassioned views of parents from different ethico-religious perspectives. Below,

21

Gilmore (2012), a formerly Catholic mother, worries that conscious objection about

her child participating in the Communion ceremony would lead to them being

ostracised, perhaps ironically given Ireland’s twentieth century Catholic legacy, for

‘moralism’.

I don’t want to be ostracised as a mother...I don’t want to be looked at like

‘there goes that woman with all her morals and opinions’, because I would

never want to inflict my opinions on anyone else...I think that religion

should be removed from the schools. Why can’t parents who feel strongly

about raising their kids as Catholic teach them and accompany them to

classes?... If you want your children to do their Communion, then you

should bring them and teach them through the Church rather than the

schools (Gilmore 2012).

However, essentialist notions of difference can also be used in the reverse manner -

by parents who oppose a State embargo on the building of any further Catholic

schools in their locality. Reporting on a meeting held by Catholic parents about such

an embargo, CiNews, a ‘webportal for Christians’, states:

Louise Carey, who organised the meeting and gathered signatures of those

parents wishing to bring their fight directly to Minister for Education

Ruairi Quinn, said the meeting showed that families are currently not

being heard on the request for Catholic places. ‘We have to fight as

parents,’ Ms Carey said (O’Gorman 2012).

The framing of ‘too many Catholic primary schools’ through an essentialist,

ahistorical discourse of diversity and choice can thus be deployed in reverse fashion

22

to paint Catholics as occupying a minority position. Notably, while these latter

parents construct their politics in terms of state imposition by neglect, they reinforce

the legitimacy of unitary State power in ‘resolving’ the issue.

Attempts at responsibilisation: A contribution to the debate

In the above excerpts, legitimate State power is constructed in and through the

mediated requirement for patrons, including the Catholic Church, to be service

providers who meet the needs of contemporary education (markets) in a new Ireland:

to be accountable for and explicit about their ethos, and to cater to a more diverse

range of educational consumers. In reality, the discourse of ‘authentic personal

choice’ works to protect the dominance of traditionally Catholic schools, in its

implicit construction of active, responsible (and inactive, irresponsible) choosers.

Instead of making significant interventions on the overwhelming Catholic Church

ownership and trusteeship of state-funded primary schools, the discourses of freedom

of choice and diversity attempt to responsibilise parents to make calculated decisions

regarding their child’s schooling on the basis of an essentialised ethos, thus

oversimplifying the realities of school access processes (Daly and Hickey 2011).

These attempts at self-responsibilisation are partially successful in terms of the

increased circulation of discourses of freedom of choice and diversity, which re-

legitimate State and patron power in a ‘new Ireland’. But the low response to the

patronage survey may reflect the continuance of an unquestioned Catholic habitus

locally (Inglis 2007), which intersects with, and is expressed in lived ways through

the politics of class and race.

While providing a whistle-stop tour of some of the ways in which governance

operates through the mediated discourses of diversity and choice in one specific site,

this paper contributes to the ideas of thinkers in addition to Habermas such as Asad

23

(2003) and Beckford (2012), who do not use the term ‘post-secular’. Nevertheless,

they certainly recognise the increased religious diversity of regions such as Europe,

which were formerly thought to be undergoing linear secularisation. However, Asad

(2003) takes the view that the religious and the sacred are socio-temporal constructs

co-developed in the situated interplay of material and cultural forces. Instances of

what are defined as ‘religious’ can be understood as cultural forms that both embody

and signify, but are not reducible to, historically specific, material forms of struggle.

The ‘religious’ cannot thus be reduced to Habermasian notions of religious ‘absence’

and ‘return’. Beckford (2012) also argues against the term post-secular given the

diversity of ways the term is used, and the subsequent impossibility of finitely

evaluating whether regions or states have entered a post-secular age.

I have posed the question in terms of governance beyond reified, pre-existing

and singular religious identities, and centralised power bases such as Media, State or

Religion. Instead, I have suggested that we must consider how religious pursuits – and

the definition of same - are already implicated, or caught up in, the ordering and co-

ordination of complex and hierarchical social systems. In this regard, I call for a

sociology in which the governmentalities that define and authenticate particular

parent and child subjects to the exclusion and/or erasure of others needs to be further

pursued in studies of school ethos and religion. This must involve a refusal of singular

concepts of identity (e.g. the singularly religious and typically passive child), and

notions of the state as (a) neutral and (b) the only ‘source’ of governance. While

critiques of state-funded, predominantly denominational education as ‘imposing’

certain values on children and families may at times be necessary, we must attend to

the variety of discursive practices and political interests through which parent and

child subjects become intelligible, and included or designated over others as

24

‘religious’, ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’. In this regard, I have suggested the potential that the

concept of governmentality has to offer the study of religious expression and

governance in a global age.

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Acknowledgements

Dr. Kitching would like to thank the reviewers, and colleagues Dr. Yafa Shanneik,

29

Dr. Stephen O’Brien, Professor Denis O’Sullivan, Professor Dympna Devine and

Professor Mairtin Mac an Ghaill for helpful discussions on previous drafts. Any faults

or omissions are entirely his own.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!i The Republic of Ireland is hereafter referred to as ‘Ireland’. ii Denominational schools account for 96% of all primary schools in Ireland (Coolahan,

Hussey and Kilfeather 2012).