This Used To Be Our Playground

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From top: Google Earth image of Clonkeen College rugby picthes; Outside Clonkeen College, Deansgrange, County Dublin; Peter Tanham

Further to news that the Christian Brothers are selling off 60% of Deansgrange, County Dublin-based Clonkeen College’s pitches for €18m, in part to pay for their €10m contribution to the sex abuse redress scheme….

Peter Tanham writes:

The move by the Christian Brothers has been condemned by parents, pupils, staff and local residents. Understandably so, as it will have significant impact on the community.

This unilateral decision by the Christian Brothers has implications far beyond Dun Laoghaire. It serves as a microcosm for the trouble we all face as religious organisation, who own much of our schools, hospitals and public service infrastructure, continue their decline.

Who Own Schools in Ireland?

To start understanding the larger problem, let’s pause to remind ourselves how the Irish schools system is organised. The Department of Education sets the national curriculum, sets the standards for teachers and pays their salaries. It also pays for most of the investment to build and maintain school buildings and facilities.

However, it doesn’t run the individual schools. Instead, it outsources this responsibility to organisations like the ERST, Catholic Schools, Educate Together and others. These organisations are known as Patrons. Patrons establish the ethos of the schools, they set the enrolment policies and they appoint the Boards of Management to each individual school in their patronage. The Board are in charge of the day-to-day running of each school.

96% percent of our Primary Schools and half of our secondary schools are in the patronage of a religious organisation.

Technically, these schools are privately owned but publicly funded, since the taxpayer pays the bulk of the building and running costs.

The Sale of the Pitches

This brings us back to Clonkeen College. The Christian Brothers own the land and the buildings, the Edmund Rice Schools Trust (ERST), a lay organisation created by the Brother’s in 2008, are the Patrons, and the taxpayer (via the Department of Education) pay for the teachers, pupils and investment in buildings and facilities.

In recent years the Department of Education (i.e. taxpayer funds) have spent €700,000 to drain, level and fence the playing pitches around the school, according to the principal Edward Melly.

They made these investments because the Christian Brothers gave them a guarantee that the school’s land, although owned by the Christian Brothers, would be given on licence to the ERST as long as the school is in existence.

“The Brothers gave us repeated permission to invest in and carry out works on the lands. They gave us no indication at any point they were at risk. We made extensive investments based on that information.”

On May 3, 2017, the Christian Brothers unilaterally informed the school’s board of management that they had entered into contracts for the sale of 7.5 acres – about 60% of the school’s sports pitches.

This week, after a parliamentary question in the Dáil, Richard Bruton admitted that the Christian Brothers have told him that the pitches have already been sold after 12 months of secret negotiations with a property developer.

The Christian Brother’s gave no prior warning to the School’s principal, parents or Board of Management.

That is the state of our Education infrastructure in Ireland in 2017. Over 2,000 schools are maintained and run with taxpayer money, but if the organisation which owns them decides to sell the facilities, we can’t intervene to stop them.

As we speak, how many other schools’ facilities might the Church be secretly negotiating to sell?

Effect on the Community

The sale of two thirds of a school’s pitches will undoubtedly be detrimental to the education of the 500 pupils of the school, but more than that it should act as a canary in the coal mine for how we, as a country, approach not just education but public service provision in general.

Last month, The Religious Sisters of Jesus and Mary got €13m from the sale of a 5.4-acre land attached to Our Lady’s Grove Primary School in Goatstown Road, despite protests of parents.

We are all paying, through taxes, to invest in public infrastructure like Schools and hospitals, which are owned not by us, but by private organisations who are then free to turnaround and sell them or change their use in ways that aren’t in everyone’s collective best interest.

Nowhere is this more evident and troublesome than the €300m we’re about to invest in a new National Maternity Hospital which will be fully owned by a private organisation, not the state.

Where We Go From Here

The numbers in the religious organisations in Ireland are rapidly dwindling and getting older. They will be the first to tell you that. They see the writing on the wall.

We’re at the start of a decade or two of massive change, which can either one of two outcomes. The first, if our government remain disengaged, is more and more schools being affected like Clonkeen and Our Lady’s Grove, with their lands sold to the highest bidder. Rising property prices will drive this further.

The second, is that we re-engage with these organisations, using both carrots and sticks, to start the necessary transfer of education provision into the custody of the state, as it is in any modern country.

I have talked to many in the church who acknowledge that (in their words) they took the education system this far, but now it needs to be handed over to the state.

There are many good people within these organisations who know that the transition needs to take place, and they just want acknowledgement that many of them did good, honest, compassionate work to educate where the state failed to do so.

It is possible to acknowledge that good work of those in religious life, while at the same time abhorring the current set up and feel an urgent need for change.

This doesn’t have to be a battle at every stage, but at many points it will be.

In my day job (I run a tech company), when people make large investments in a business they take equity ownership. I don’t see why the same can’t happen here.

If Simon Harris is investing €300m in the National Maternity Hospital, at the bare minimum that should come with a large % ownership stake in the Saint Vincent Hospital Group.

Every time the Department of Education makes an investment in a school property or grounds, it could similarly start taking equity in the school ownership in return.

The funds they used to buy these lands came from tax exempt donations from the Irish public. These tax exemptions amount to decades of public subsidies, so compelling them to act in the public interest isn’t an outrageous demand.

Over time we can start transitioning our public infrastructure into state ownership for the benefit of future generations – exactly where it should have been all along. This is not an immediate solution, but a problem this big rarely has quick fixes.

Peter Tanham is the CEO of an Irish tech company and the Social Democrats representative for Dun Laoghaire. Follow Peter on Twitter: @PeterTanham

Rollingnews/Google Earth

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19 thoughts on “This Used To Be Our Playground

  1. Gay Tea Shop

    Nothing millennials haven’t been doing to the local population of Dublin 8 – it’s called progress apparently.

  2. Zaccone

    There are a large number of fully maintained pitches literally 50metres away from the school in Meadowvale, that are not in use during the week while the school is in session. They’re only used at the weekends by the football club. These can easily be used by the school for PE/team training/matches during the week.

    The school has no need for the ones which are now sold – theres no need for there to be 10+ playing fields within a 1km squared area, in an area which is crying out for new housing to be built.

    The SocDems can’t complain about a housing crisis in Dublin on the one hand, and then object to the building of high density housing on the other.

    1. Fact Checker

      South County Dublin is littered with large tracts of grass suitable for field sports.

      On his other point, he is correct, the state should indeed take an equity stake whenever it provides capital funding for school upgrades.

      1. Andy

        Google maps of socodu is literally a sea of green. Between large backgardens, pointless greens in housing estates and parks.

        We need houses more than we need an over supply of playing pitches.

        Same objections were heard out in the school next to St Annes. Loosing 3 pitches even though there were 30 pitches available in St Annes park with the school sits on a corner of.

        1. Fact Checker

          Ireland is a veritable paradise for grass-based field sports.

          While these sports are played by lots of people at some point, they are played for a very short period of one’s life. Virtually no one over thirty (2/3 of the population) consistently plays a sport on grass.

          A community gets more use from a swimming pool and an all-weather pitch than 20 grass pitches.

        2. Melissa

          Those 30 pitches you refer to is St Anne’s Park. If you care to visit you will find that the surrounding landless football, Rugby and GAA pitches are at full capacity within the park and surrounding communities use St Paul’s pitches when the school isn’t. Further those pitches were sold at a discounted price to the religious order to facilitate the setting up of the school. The park land was originally gifted to the state to the people of Dublin to enjoy open space – a charitable act.

      2. Zaccone

        His other point is completely valid – if the state is paying for the school’s running, it should run them. But thats a an issue/change that would have to apply moving forwards.

        Trying to apply it to the Clonkeen case, when the land is already sold, and the case for not selling is so flimsy, just seems an attempt to win local NIMBY votes more than anything else.

        1. Dan

          Those pitches in meadowvale are far from maintained, drainage and grass cover is pathetic.

          Our school pumped almost 1 million into developing the pitches so they would be of the highest standard, to have them taken off us to fund an eye sore of a building project ( considering there is a massive project about to begin in cherrywood over the coming years which would more than suffice local housing needs) is an absolute disgrace. The lessons taught on those pitches are far more valuable to our local community than a couple high rise apartments, so honestly unless you have any idea what it’s like to be a member of the school community its probably best not to comment on the matter as you have a very limited insight into the effects that the loss of space would cause

    2. Stephen

      To me the point isn’t so much the getting rid of the pitches it is more that the Irish state has invested money in a resource which the Christian Brothers are now selling off and making money on, a resource which really should be owned by the Irish people who paid for it.

      1. Increasing Displacement

        I can’t understand how the above commentors are missing that point

        This country is a sham

    1. Dan

      The pitches are actually drawn on the day of a game, there is no set GAA/Soccer pitch, and in recent years the school has introduced a rugby team. the field is versatile in the sense that a pitch can be drawn on the grass to suit any field sport

  3. francis almond

    these people are Christians. can they not turn the other cheek, forgive their brothers and move on?

  4. Mark Dowling

    The urban Councils of Ireland should immediately seek to zone all school lands as institutional/recreational/parks. The only way transactions like this work are the expectation of building houses on them. The comments above say “there is loads of green space” but space contiguous to a school is essential if only for safety to reduce the need for kids to have recreation off-site in nearby hired pitches etc. Once the houses are built and school enrolment goes up we will ask where the green space went when fields and yards are packed. And where will we build the houses? Mid rise stacked townhouses and other forms while fall between the semi-ds for which there is no land except sprawl beyond the M50 and thieving public space inside it, and tower blocks which Ireland doesn’t seem to know how to maintain over the long run.

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