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IRELAND: Disparity between north and south at General Synod
From IrishAngle Website
7/5/2005
The Church may not be a democracy but General Synod members hoping for a better balance in representation between north and south will be disappointed when they travel to Dublin.
On the face of it, the make-up of the Church of Ireland General Synod seems fair and representative.
After all, its 660 members - including the 12 bishops - are drawn from 12 dioceses right across Ireland and include lay people and clergy.
But dig a bit deeper and an inequity which distinctly favours the less populous southern dioceses emerges. According to the last figures published by the Church in 2003, it has 345,745 members throughout Ireland.
Of these, 281,751 - or 82 per cent - are found in the northern dioceses of Connor, Down and Dromore, Derry and Raphoe, Clogher and the archdiocese of Armagh. Yet they have only 52 per cent of synod members.
The imbalance is even more striking when one realises that dioceses pay levies into central funds according to their size. Under the current system, this means that synod representation is not linked to taxation.
Against this backdrop of northern under-representation, a working group was tasked in 2003 with finding a way of softening the discrepancy. It proposed a way of evening out the southern-bias, coming up with a system which would have given the northern dioceses 61 per cent of synod seats.
But according to its report, the Standing Committee was divided on whether the proposal would receive sufficient support if it was put to - the southern-dominated - General Synod.
The committee observed, in an ecclesiastical way of saying that turkeys do not vote for Christmas, that: "It was decided that there would be insufficient support for the proposals by the General Synod and no recommendations were made."
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