I wish to raise the issue of school patronage because there has been painfully slow progress in this area during the past five years.

There is now an onus on the Minister to make this a priority issue in the education portfolio. If we are a true republic, we must ensure that our institutions respect and reflect the diversity of modern Irish society. This is true in respect of education in particular. The State has a serious responsibility to ensure that every child has access to a State-funded school in his or her own locality and that the ethos of that school reflects the ethos of the family concerned. A significant number of parents have no choice but to send their child to a school that does not align with their own belief system. Many parents feel they must baptise their children in order that they can be enrolled in a local State-funded school. This situation is entirely unacceptable in this day and age and must be dealt with as a matter of priority.

This week, the Minister appeared to endorse the community national school model, which involves splitting classes and segregating children on religious grounds for part of the school day. This happens because the Catholic Church insisted on a requirement to have faith formation classes and preparation for sacraments during school hours in these schools. We know this thanks to the excellent research carried out by Emma O'Kelly of RTE, who had access to documents obtained under the freedom of information provisions which showed that this was an agreement reached between the Catholic Church and the then Government in 2007. It is incredible that such an agreement was reached only nine years ago.

I have two questions for the Minister. Will he commit this morning to repealing section 7(3)(c) of the Equal Status Act in order to ensure that all children can access their local publicly funded primary school irrespective of their belief system? Will he end this most blatant form of discrimination against our children? Does the Minister accept that the community national school model entails segregation on religious grounds and runs counter to the principles of child-centredness and inclusiveness? If so, why is he endorsing it?

I thank the Deputy for raising what I believe is an important question. There is no doubt that Ireland has changed and citizens have different expectations of all Departments, but most particularly in the area of education. It is my ambition to help parents to have access to the school of their choice. As the Deputy rightly points out, over 95% of our schools are denominational, and my ambition is to deliver the commitment in the programme for Government to treble the number of schools that offer alternatives to denominational patronage. My vision for this is to have as much diversity as possible. I do not see the merit in confining our approach to a single model. That is why I have sought to accelerate all the elements of the existing strategy and to provide new schools. Last week, I provided new schools in the Deputy's neighbouring area, Cabra, and in Marino, with Educate Together as patron. We need to continue to provide new schools with new patrons. Virtually all the schools where new patrons are being appointed are multidenominational or non-denominational. The progress that is being made on the transfer of patronage, which was initiated by Deputy Ruairí Quinn and continued by Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, is something we can accelerate. I will form a working group which will sit down with the Catholic patrons to seek to accelerate that work. It is recognised as an area in which slow progress has been made, but we hope to accelerate this progress.

I do not share the Deputy's view regarding the role of the community national school. A school that is in State rather than private patronage and that offers, under one umbrella, the opportunity for faith-based instruction and makes provision for other options offers a good model that will allow us to transition. If we are moving from a situation in which more than 95% of schools are denominational we will need models that can accommodate parents with different views of the type of education their children should have, and the model of community-based national schools under the education and training boards, as a State-sponsored patron, is a good one that has potential. We have to look at it and look at the programmes that children who do not opt to be in a denomination receive. I am very open to considering how we can improve those programmes, but I do not share the Deputy's view that we should throw out a model that allows different views of education to thrive under one umbrella.

I thank the Minister for his reply, but he is not addressing the core issue. He is talking about endorsing a model that entails segregating children during the school day. How can that possibly be right? What he is suggesting is that education policy should put the interests of children second to the interest of any church. How can the Minister defend that situation? Just imagine that for a half an hour in every school day, children are segregated according to religion. That cannot possibly be right. At a very minimum, is the Minister prepared to insist that any denominational instruction is moved to the end of the school day so that we do not have this kind of divisive and anti-inclusive policy in operation in the community national schools?

The Minister has not addressed the other question about section 7 of the Equal Status Act, which will continue to allow thousands of schools to discriminate purely on the grounds of religion. Is the Minister prepared to give a commitment to repeal that section here in order to stop that kind of discrimination?

I do not agree with the Deputy. Children do different things during the course of the school day. If we can create a model that is acceptable to a lot of parents and that offers diversity within that school, it is something to be celebrated.

There is no evidence that it is acceptable.

It is something we should include. It is not the exclusive model. We will have the Educate Together model, the Gaelscoil model, some denominational models and so on. Diversity, with different education offerings to parents who want different things, is the right approach.

On the issue of the Equal Status Act, it was not considered in the admissions Bill that was introduced during the last Government and it will not be part of the admissions Bill that I will publish soon, but the Dáil will have to debate its approach to this. There is constitutional protection for religions within our Constitution and the last Oireachtas committee recognised that there is a difficulty here. That has to be recognised. The Equal Status Act provides, and we will provide in the admissions Bill, that a denominational school must accept a non-denominational child, but if the school is oversubscribed that may not be the case, and 20% of schools are oversubscribed. This is a matter on which I will consult with other Oireachtas Members and we will be able to debate it in the Oireachtas.

It is something the Minister should be leading on.