Atheist Ireland met this week with Lt Col Padraig Brennan, chair of the Irish Defence Forces Review of the Chaplaincy service. Here are our thoughts and recommendations that we expressed at the meeting. The Defence Forces website states that “The Defence Forces are committed to...
In the marriage figures issued by the CSO the Humanist Association of Ireland solemnised 9.3% of all marriages in 2022. Since the introduction of the Civil Registration Amendment Act in 2012, the Humanist Association have been permitted to legally solemnise marriages. That has come at...
Atheist Ireland has obtained figures from the CSO showing the 62 types of wedding ceremonies in Ireland in 2022. They range from Roman Catholic to the Rites of Passage of the Indigenous Wisdom Tradition of Celtic Druid Temple. Only about 44% were some variation of...
One in five Irish weddings last year were spiritualist ceremonies, according to information obtained by Atheist Ireland last week. This is twice the number you would think from the published CSO statistics, which hide half of the spiritualist marriages under the label ‘other religious’. This...
The number of Catholic weddings has recovered from its dramatic drop during Covid, and has returned to the pattern of steady decline that has been happening for the past decade. In the decade since 2012, the percentage of Catholic weddings has dropped from 65.2% to...
The Artificial Intelligence app ChatGPT wrote a nursery rhyme about God, but it would not write a nursery rhyme about atheism, because it said it cannot generate inappropriate or sensitive content. After a lengthy discussion about AI training data, freedom of religion or belief, discrimination,...
In Ireland, organisations with religious privilege live in a bubble. They never have to change their ways, because they can get away with giving lip service to equality, diversity, and inclusion and get lauded for it. The right to freedom of conscience, religion and belief...
Atheist Ireland has sent the following response to a letter from Bernie McNally, Secretary General of the Department of Education, regarding our correspondence with the Oireachtas Education Committee about the right to not attend religious instruction in schools. Dear Secretary General, We refer to your...
One of the issues that Atheist Ireland raised in our recent meeting with the Catholic Education Partnership was that schools are refusing to comply with the legal requirement to include in their admission policies arrangements for children who exercise their constitutional right to not attend...
The Court of Appeal found that, when it interprets the obligations of a Board of Management under the Education Act 1998, it must have regard to the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights. Probably no Board of Management in the country is even...