In a recent debate on Newstalk, Senator Rónán Mullen expressed his opposition to the secularisation of Irish schools. He said, “If you only want children taught to read, write and to be good tools for the economy, then you might as well let AI do the job. But everybody who is sensible about what education is about knows that you can’t separate it from values.”
He continued, “The question then is, whose values do you want? Do you want the values of Jesus Christ? Karl Marx’s? Or Donald Trump’s? For all the ups and downs of the story of the Catholic Church in Ireland, many people still say ‘Christianity’, ‘Jesus Christ’, I want my child to have some of that in their life.”
Senator Mullen talked about the importance of parental choice in the educational system, saying, “It’s parents’ rights that are there under the Constitution. And if parents want some kind of underlay of Christian values for their children in school, they are entitled to it.”
In November 2024, Senator Mullen raised questions about the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment’s (NCCA) consultation processes regarding changes to the Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) curriculum. He said that “many parents do not know the primary curriculum was being revised.”
“You can’t divorce education… It is about creating an environment for children where they receive certain value. Values are important to parents, and they don’t necessarily want… civil servants and NGOs deciding what values their kids are going to have… All over the world, there are people who want to send their children to Catholic schools in non-Christian countries… you could say [it is] because of the quality of the Catholic education. Most people want it, and they don’t buy into politically correct arguments.”
