The recent so-called controversy regarding the transportation of non-Protestant children on a schoolbus operated by Limerick VEC for Villiers Secondary School has been nothing more than yet another opportunity for the quarehawks in the renagade fringe of the Republican movement to get their ugly mugs in the content starved pages of the weekday Limerick Leader.
To give a little background, the parents of two children have been refused the use of the Villiers Schoolbus because they are not Protestants. Villiers School was set up to cater for the protestant community so they have given Protestant children priority with regard to the use of this bus.
Now those affilliated with the Republican Sinn Fein movement are calling for a picket of Limerick VEC and claim that this “discrimination” is no different to the treatment of Catholic children during the Holycross school unrest.
But they fail to mention two distinct facts. Firstly Catholics are not being singled out at Villiers. This policy affects all those children who are non-Protestant. The policy has been there since the 1960s and no one has had a problem with it until now. In Holycross, children were being attacked because they were being victimised. At Villiers, they are not.
The second fact is that the parents of these children knew damn well that they were sending their kids to a Protestant school before they entered first year. If they had any sense, they would have understood that, as the school was set up for Protestants, their primary duty was to look after Protestants first.
If these parents have a problem with a Protestant School, of which there are few in the country, looking after Protestants first, then they should have considered sending their children to either a Catholic or a non-denominational school. The alternative would be to pack too many children onto busses, risking their safety, just so a bunch of hairy men in the Barstool Brigade of the republican movement can “make a point.” There have been problems with safety on Irish schoolbusses in the past, which like what happened in County Meath last year, resulted in children being killed.
You would not expect a bus for disabled children, going to a disabled school, to put the interest of ablebodied children before its primary market. If there isnt enough room on the schoolbus after the Protestant community, for which the school was set up to cater for, have been taken care of, then it is tough shit.
The Barstool Brigade need to cop them selves on as well. This attention whoring over stupid and trivial issues, makes you look stupid, and more like an attention whore than a community activist.
