At the meeting in Leinster House on April 23, the Committee was told that hundreds of teachers would be joining the dole queues at the end of this school year because of Government cutbacks.

Principals of schools said they would be forced to lay off up to 10 per cent of their staff due to the Government's removal of grants and reduction in allocation of teachers to schools.

“The next three teachers that leave a school will not be replaced by the state,” said Sr. Eileen Radley of the Loreto Education Trust.

Ferdia Kelly, general secretary of the Joint Managerial Body (JMB), which represents 400 voluntary secondary schools in Ireland including 56 fee-paying schools, said that Budget 2009 has had a devastating impact on all schools.

“It must be recognised that the effects of such cutbacks will create major difficulties for all voluntary secondary schools,” he said.

The Oireachtas Education Committee heard that the future of some of the country’s prestigious fee-paying schools might be threatened by the cuts.

“Indeed the severity of the cutbacks is such that it threatens the future viability of a number of voluntary secondary schools, both free education and fee-charging," Ferdia Kelly said.

“Schools that charge fees are set, from next September, to experience a serious staffing reduction.”

Belvedere College, a fee-paying school in central Dublin, will lose 10 per cent of its teachers, the Oireachtas Committee was told, while Bandon Grammar School in Co Cork will lose three teachers.

The JMB also warned that Budget 2009 would result in lay-offs in the state’s 34 boarding schools.

In addition, Ferdia Kelly pointed out, Budget 2009 had fundamentally changed the way the state treats minority faith schools run by Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of Ireland, Religious Society of Friends or Jewish denominations.

“Parents from the minority community who wish to send their children to an appropriate school are now singularly disadvantaged,” he said.

This issue will be discussed at the the Church of Ireland general synod in Armagh in mid-May. Its Episcopal Secretary, the Most Reverend Dr Richard Clarke, has written to Minister O'Keeffe expressing the community's concerns.

"In most parts of the State, Protestants who do not meet the rigorous means-tested criteria enjoined on the Secondary Education Committee, but who want their child to attend a Protestant school, uniquely within the country, have no option but to pay for that which, in contrast, the majority of Irish secondary school pupils are not obliged to pay for: second-level education in a school of their own religious characteristic spirit and ethos," Reverend Clarke wrote. (Sources: Irish Times, Irish Independent)