Carmel O'Boyle, a teacher in Castlewellan for 29 years and member of the South Eastern Education and Library Board, said the Sinn Fein minister was presiding over the "privatisation of education".

Rebellion

And Mrs O'Boyle, who is also an SDLP councillor, predicted that other Catholic schools would follow Lumen Christi College in Londonderry in defying the minister and introducing their own tests.

"This is a mess of Sinn Fein's own making, primarily because they chose to hand the education portfolio to a minister to whom this area has always been foreign," she said.

Despite supporting Ms Ruane's stated desire to abolish academic selection, Mrs O'Boyle said: "Exhortations to the minister to show leadership are belated and futile, since she clearly has neither the communication skills, nor the specialised skills needed to persuade people that academic selection is wrong.

"I, like everyone else, have been waiting impatiently for twelve months, to hear the details of Ms Ruane's elusive 'proposals' and so far, all we have been served up are platitudes about how much she cares for children."

Attack

Mrs O'Boyle said Ms Ruane was "a woman who either preaches or harangues" and attacked her espousal of the education system in the Republic of Ireland — while she sends her children across the border from her Louth home to a grammar school in Northern Ireland.

And, referring to the announcement on Wednesday that the Association for Quality Education (AQE), which announced on Wednesday that it intends to set up its own transfer process, had no need to slip in by the back door, when Ms Ruane has left the front door wide open for them.

"She has presided over the privatisation of selection by allowing the AQE enough time to advance their proposals, and, like Lumen Christi College in Derry, other Catholic grammar schools will follow suit, or risk catholic children opting to do the entrance tests to the voluntary grammars."