The Aontú Education spokesman, Eric Nelligan, has expressed “deep concern” over what he described as an “attack” by the Minister for Higher Education on single-sex schools.
Eric Nelligan, an Assistant Principal in an all-male school in Limerick City, St Munchins College, was critical of Minister Patrick O’Donovan who said that ‘society would be better’ with a co-ed learning model – with Mr Nelligan saying the Minister linked concerns around increasing aggression and gender-based violence to the number of single sex schools in Ireland.
This assault comes not long after the Labour Party introduced a Bill which would see all single sex schools in the primary system phased out within 10 years, and within 15 years in Post Primary.
Mr Nelligan said “the attack from a Minister in the Department of Education coupled with a Labour party Bill is the latest in a series of efforts to attack single sex schools and remove them from Irish education”.
What is concerning is that they are disgracefully attempting to link violence and aggression in society to members of Single Sex schooling communities. Min O’Donovan is doing so with the slightest piece of evidence to substantiate his stance and is another example Fine Gael attempting to elevate a non-issue to the status of a national problem and then pose as the action man figure finally doing something about it. All the while the real solution is not being tackled.
There is not one piece of research or data anywhere in the world to support the Patrick O’Donovan view. The World Health Organisation, WHO, conducted intensive research and concluded that several factors can be associated with gender and domestic abuse, 16 reasons were listed, alcohol overuse being the main factor, and single sex education was nowhere on the list.
Mr Nelligan continues ‘’Single sex schooling is a very popular choice in Ireland, despite the fact that no new single sex school has been built in 3 decades the vast majority are heavily oversubscribed. Currently approximately 30% of Post Primary schools are Single Sex yet they accommodate 60% of the students. This is even more impressive when the overwhelming majority of students attend mixed primary schools. There is a co-educational secondary school in every town in the country, this is not the case for single sex yet people still flock to single sex schools.’’
“While Ireland has the second highest rate of students in single sex schools in the EU, it has the lowest rate of homicides against females, and in the whole world Ireland has the 11th lowest rate of femicide out of the 193 UN member states”, Mr Nelligan said.
“In an era when the citizens of the country demand more choice and less authoritarianism from those in government it is disappointing that Minister O’Donovan would seek to remove a valid parental choice for their child’s education. There is no educational logic to this call, it boils down to a flawed ideological viewpoint about the root cause of ‘toxic’ personality traits and the desire by those in government to decide what are acceptable educational institutions,” he added.