My heart goes out to Mary Stokes. She is right that the so-called "parent rule" indirectly discriminated against her son getting a place in his local Christian Brothers High School in Clonmel. It has happened to others who have found themselves on the wrong side of the admissions policies of some schools when it come to the "parent rule", the "sibling rule" or the "ethos rule".

It particularly affects children of newcomer families, whose parents would have attended schools in a different country, those of no religion, and of course, as we've seen, the children of Travellers who have not completed an education, either in Ireland or elsewhere.

Mary Stokes is obviously a very determined mother who wants the absolute best for her child. But as a Traveller woman she is fighting against more than just a dated and discriminatory law, she is up against centuries of tradition in a community where education - as in academic learning - is not as valued as mothers like herself would want it to be.

It's actually not that long since anything more than a rudimentary education was deemed superfluous for many Irish children - and completely unnecessary for the majority of young girls. Thankfully, times have changed.

While many of my own generation have parents who never even got to sit the Leaving Certificate, many of us now expect that our children will aim to complete third-level education and at least earn a primary college degree. We have learned that in Ireland, as elsewhere, the better the education the better chance for success in our society.

Unfortunately though, it can often be the case that one's position in society can determine both access to - and success in - the educational system.

Coming from a community or a culture where education is not considered the most important part of a young person's upbringing after a stable, healthy family life, is a clear disadvantage.

Just a couple of weeks before the Supreme Court's rejection of the appeal by Mary Stokes, a Traveller wedding was in the news for all the wrong reasons. Bernard McGinley was shot outside St Mary's Chapel, in Newtownbutler in Co Fermanagh while a wedding was taking place inside. Later the priest who performed the wedding spoke to RTE's Morning Ireland programme. He sounded shocked that he had to continue with the ceremony after the shooting, saying that "the mother-of-the-bride insisted" it take place.

Hmm, that's all very well, one would think, but what about the bride herself, what did she think? According to Fr Michael King: "the bride was fairly afraid and looked shocked...".

"She had the look of being frightened the whole way through the liturgy and the Mass". And really, who could blame her? Especially when we heard that she had just turned 17 and her groom was even younger, at just over 16. Children, both of them, whose only concerns at that age should have been their school exams. A tradition of marrying very young and then having large families is usually anathema to progress, not just in the Traveller community, but in every culture where women are seen as being fit for little else but marriage and breeding (and it's not so long since most Irish women were viewed like this).

But Traveller women now face three-fold discrimination: as Travellers, as women and as Traveller women. They are still expected to marry very young, move to their husband's site and start having children immediately. As one young woman explained (in a Pavee Point report titled Travellers Attitudes to Sexual Relationships and Sex Education): "With Travellers, even before you get married, a single girl is not supposed to go anywhere on her own until she gets married. She can't go to the pictures on her own, she can't go to a disco, she's not supposed to go to a pub, and then you get married".

A report some years ago detailing the extremely low levels of literacy and numeracy among the Traveller community cited some of the difficulties Traveller women face getting their children to school. One woman said: "I have 10 children and seven are at school. I am lucky to be able to get five of them off in time and the two older boys decide for themselves whether to go to school or stay at home." The report also said that: "Some of the parents interviewed felt that their children achieved satisfactory attendance when they went to school for two or three days each week."

Teachers are exasperated at this attitude, leading to one saying to a young Traveller girl: "Why would you want to know how to read and write? You're going to go off and marry young and have loads of children."

This isn't good enough. The only way that Traveller children will escape the discrimination and deprivation so many of them face is through education. They need role-models within their own community to show them how they can achieve success in the outside world; not just as advocates for Traveller rights or reality TV Traveller stars, but as ordinary people going to college and then following careers not defined by what the settled community deem to be part of Traveller culture.

A few exceptional Traveller children have achieved this - model and Trinity graduate Sarah Jane Dunne being a great example - but far too many fight cultural (particularly from Traveller fathers) opposition to their education.

A 2013 study by UCD showed that the most important thing for a child's well-being in life was the education of the parents - in particular that of the mother. "Better-educated parents were shown to be more likely to delay the start of childbearing until their late 20s, while the least educated mothers were more likely to have a first child before age 25." The tradition of marrying young and immediately starting large families mitigates against Traveller children succeeding in education - and consequently in wider society. Until they can get a generation to view extended education as the norm, rather than early marriages and large families, mothers like Mary Stokes will continue to face insurmountable challenges while fighting for their children.

@carolmhunt

Sunday Independent