LORD Steel has intervened in the row over denominational education in Scotland, claiming Catholic schools fuel sectarianism and should be phased out.

The Liberal Democrat peer and former presiding officer of the Scottish parliament said there was “stark evidence” that separate schools for Catholics and Protestants were perpetuating the religious divide.

Writing in today’s Sunday Times, Steel accused the Catholic church of “burying its head in the sand” by refusing to acknowledge that faith schools were divisive.

While the former Liberal leader added that he welcomed religious and moral education, he said it was most effective in a non- denominational setting.

His comments follow a call last week from Sam Galbraith, the former education minister, for Catholic schools to be scrapped. He said they were the “root cause” of sectarian bigotry in Scotland and fostered intolerance.

Steel’s intervention has drawn an angry response from the Catholic Church, which has insisted that the future of Catholic schools is not a matter of pressing public concern and that to debate the issue risks “fanning the flames of religious hatred”.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of Scotland’s Catholics, has accused the media of anti-Catholic bias in its coverage of denominational education and is to launch a “media monitoring” campaign in the New Year.

The debate started last week in The Sunday Times on the future of denominational schools in Scotland is one well worth having and should not be seen as an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs,” said Steel.

“It is a legitimate question here, as in Northern Ireland, whether separate denominational schools help to perpetuate the sectarian divide.

“The stark evidence is that in large parts of Scotland they do, and the Catholic church buries its head in the sand if it pretends otherwise.”

The peer, whose son-in-law is Hindu and has three grandchildren who attend Catholic schools, added: “Now that we have a substantial non-Christian population in our midst we should be educating our children in at least the basics of the different faiths and that is best done in a non-denominational setting.”

Steel, who has sat in Westminster, Holyrood and the House of Lords, said his strong convictions had been shaped by his own childhood experiences.

“When I started school my father was a Church of Scotland minister in Dumbarton and I attended the primary department of Dumbarton Academy,” he said.

“I have a clear recollection of junior taunts when we threw stones at the ‘papes’ at their primary school and they came to do likewise to us. Needless to say, at the age of five and six none of us had a clue what a ‘pape’ was; we simply knew that they were different from us and that we were against them.

“But it is an indication of how deeply rooted sectarian antagonism was and sadly still is in many communities.”

Steel said the situation was mirrored in pre-independence Kenya, where his family later moved, where schools were strictly divided on racial grounds.

“The segregation in schools there was damaging to good race relations, just as it can be in Scotland today to inter-faith relations,” he said.

While Steel paid tribute to the efforts made by O’Brien and the heads of other faiths to bring different religions together, he said he believed it was only a matter of time before denominational schools were phased out.

However, the Catholic church dismissed Steel’s claim that denominational schools fostered intolerance.

“It is just nonsense to say that Catholic schools perpetuate sectarianism,” said a spokesman. “In Scotland, 15%-20% of all children who attend Catholic schools are non-Catholic, and around 40% of all parents who send their children to Catholic schools do not call themselves Catholics.

“Those figures show that the Catholic system is more inclusive than the non- denominational. Many Protestants, Muslims, Hindus and children of no faith attend Catholic schools.

“To question the existence of Catholic schools once is not anti-Catholic, but to keep questioning their legitimacy a hundred times and not listen to the answers is, I believe, anti-Catholic.

“Such critics are the middle-class equivalent of those people who stood on the pavements of Ardoyne in north Belfast screaming abuse at the little children as they went to Holy Cross school.”

In their first joint New Year message, O’Brien and the Right Reverend Alan McDonald, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk, said they were ashamed of Scotland’s “inheritance of sectarianism”.

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