I've been writing about religious control of schools for well over a decade now, and I found that people tend to throw the same arguments out to me every time I talk about it. And there's a lot and lots of different arguments out there. The most common of which I think. And I could be wrong on this one, but the one that I'm hearing most of all these days is the argument that parents want Catholic schools, to which I'm always wondering what parents are they talking about because I'm a parent and I know lots of parents who don't want their children being being formed in a faith that isn't theirs.

But that is not what I'm going to be talking about in this podcast, because another argument that I've heard and it gets thrown around, is Catholic schools internationally. And they often say that Catholic schools in England are well very sought after so we shouldn’t lose Catholic schools in Ireland.

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