Secularism

16 August 2022

Protecting the rights of children from religious discrimination in Irish schools

The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child will be questioning Ireland next year. Atheist Ireland, the Evangelical Alliance of Ireland, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of Ireland, have made this joint submission to the UN on freedom of religion and belief in...

27 July 2022

UN again tells Ireland to provide secular schools and remove religious oaths

Atheist Ireland welcomes today’s concluding observations of the UN Human Rights Committee, which again tell Ireland to provide secular education by establishing non-denominational schools, and to further amend the Employment Equality Act to bar all forms of discrimination against teachers and medical workers. The UN...

14 July 2022

Pope confirms Catholic education is evangelisation

Pope Francis has confirmed that Catholic education is evangelisation, and has compared not speaking the truth about God in education to burning books, during a private reception in the Vatican on 22 April for educators including from Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. He also told...

10 July 2022

Ireland misleads United Nations about nondenominational schools

Atheist Ireland had this letter published in the Irish Times this week following the UN Human Rights Committee questioning Ireland under International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Minister Roderic O’Gorman told the UN Human Rights Committee this week that Ireland aims to have 400...

26 June 2022

Atheist Ireland raises religious discrimination with the UN Human Rights Committee

The United Nations Human Rights Committee is questioning Ireland in July about our human rights record under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or ICCPR. Atheist Ireland has made the following submission about Freedom of Conscience, Religion, and Belief. You can also read...

15 June 2022

State funding of Catholic-run schools comes with constitutional conditions that are ignored

With the attitude of the Catholic bishops over divesting schools, you could be forgiven for believing that the Irish Constitution explicitly sanctioned the funding of Catholic-run schools and without any conditions. The reasons that there are so many Catholic schools is because of religious privilege...

12 June 2022

Catholic Bishops lobby for the right to discriminate against non-Catholic children

Catholic Bishops lobbied the Government last June to change the law, so they could once again be allowed to discriminate against non-Catholic children in access to publicly funded primary schools. RTE’s Emma O’Kelly reported that the Bishops said their support for divesting a small number...

5 June 2022

Minister for Education gives misleading Dail answer about the right to not attend religious instruction

When protecting the right of children to not attend religious instruction in schools receiving public money, it is important to use the language in the Constitution. In particular, the right to “not attend” must not be conflated with “opting out” or “not participating”. These ambiguous...

29 May 2022

The constitutional rights of nonreligious parents in Irish schools

For years Atheist Ireland has been campaigning to protect the constitutional rights of all families in the education system. Parents have positive inalienable rights regarding the education of their children, and nonreligious parents have the same positive rights as religious parents. These rights come under:...

13 May 2022

The National Maternity Hospital must be public and secular

There will be a rally outside the Dáil at 2pm this Saturday, 14 May, organised by the Our Maternity Hospital campaign, of which Atheist Ireland is a member. The very fact that the Government has to try so hard to reassure us that the hospital...