The people of Ireland have shown a commendable willingness to strike anachronistic bias from the country’s laws, most emphatically in legalizing gay marriage last year in a referendum approved by three out of five voters. With a general election expected next month, a movement is underway in the rapidly changing nation to target another hurtful social condition by which non-Catholic children are legally denied seats at overcrowded state-financed primary schools, 97 percent of which are controlled by Catholic authorities.

With schools allowed to give preference to Catholics, other families are forced to have their children baptized in the church, linger on school waiting lists or search for scarce alternatives. Only 74 of the nation’s 3,200 primary schools are run by Educate Together, the main multidenominational alternative, whose Dublin schools are swamped with four applications for every available space.

The public is fast realizing this is an intolerable situation in a country with an increasing immigrant population of non-Catholics and a rising generation of younger nonpracticing Catholics. A poll last month measured almost 85 percent public approval for changing the law so it no longer tolerates religious bias against schoolchildren.

“Ireland is changing, there are a lot of young parents and they want something different for their kids,” Eoghan Murphy, a Fine Gael member of Parliament, told Politico in calling for school fairness as the first priority of the next government. The Irish education minister, Jan O’Sullivan of the Labor Party, is similarly calling for reassessment of the law that exempts religious schools from the Constitution’s antidiscrimination requirements if the rebuffing of nonbelievers is considered essential to “maintain the ethos of the school.”