In Ireland, freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief means that if you belong to a religious or nonreligious minority, your rights are suspended in order to guarantee freedom of religion for the religious majority. This breaches the rights of parents and children under the Irish Constitution.
This article examines what the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 about religious discrimination under the then Employment Equality Bill; what the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 about the rights of children to attend any school in receipt of public funds without attending religious instruction at that school; religious discrimination in access to schools under the Equal Status Act; and the Constitutional duty of the State to respect the philosophical convictions of parents.
What the Supreme Court ruled in 1997
In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of the then Employment Equality Bill, when it was referred to the Court under Article 26 of the Constitution. The Supreme Court found the then Bill to be unconstitutional, but it also referred to certain aspects of the Bill that could be constitutional.
One such aspect was that denominational schools could give more favourable treatment, on the religion ground, to an employee or a prospective employee “where it is reasonable to do so in order to maintain the religious ethos of the institution” or to take action “which is reasonably necessary to prevent an employee or a prospective employee from undermining the religious ethos of the institution”.
In this case the Supreme Court stated that:

“This Court accepts that it is not generally permissible to make any discrimination, or even to make any distinction, between citizens on the grounds of religious profession, belief or status. This Court has also had to accept that occasions may arise when it is necessary to make distinctions in order to give life and reality to the constitutional guarantee of the free profession and practice of religion.”

But the Supreme Court added that:

“The use of the words “reasonable” and “reasonably necessary” implies that the test is to be an objective one and that the matter is to be resolved on a case to case basis.
Counsel assigned by the Court point to the use of the word “ethos” in sub-s. 1 and submit that the religious institution or denomination will state in each case what its “ethos” is and that the test will in fact become subjective. It is true that “ethos” is a vague term and is nowhere defined in the Bill. Chambers English Dictionary gives, inter alia, the following meaning to the word “the distinctive habitual character and disposition of an individual group”.
It is probably true to say that the respect for religion which the Constitution requires the State to show implies that each religious denomination should be respected when it says what its ethos is. However the final decision on this question as well as the final decision on what is reasonable or reasonably necessary to protect the ethos will rest with the court and the court in making its overall decision will be conscious of the need to reconcile the various constitutional rights involved.”

The Supreme Court also ruled that year on the constitutionality of the then Equal Status Bill. The Supreme Court also found that Bill to be unconstitutional, because of two clauses that were unrelated to religious discrimination. Because of that decision, it did not address the question of schools being permitted to discriminate against pupils on the grounds of religion.
However, if we apply the logic of the ruling on the Employment Equality Bill, it does not necessarily follow that the courts would have found that discriminating against children in access to their nearest publicly funded school is constitutionally permissible. Nor does it follow that a religious ethos or religious integrated curriculum could seek to influence minorities who have no realistic option but to attend their nearest publicly funded school.
Most parents don’t have a choice where they send their children to school. The State ‘provides for’ their education in publicly funded denominational schools (Article 42.4).  Parents are legally obliged to send their children to school. Home schooling is not a valid option for most parents, as was found by the European Court in the Louise O’Keeffe case.
Under Article 42.3.1 of the Constitution the state shall not oblige parents in violation of their conscience and lawful preference to send their children to schools established by the state, or to any particular type of school designated by the State. Most parents simply have not got the skills to educate their children at home and they are left with a choice of denominational education for their children or no education at all.
The State provides for the education of minorities in schools with a religous purpose on a take it or leave it basis and disregards Article 42.3.1 of the Constitution. Read more…

In 2017 Atheist Ireland, the Evangelical Alliance of Ireland, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of Ireland, attended the UN questioning of Pakistan in Geneva to speak on behalf of persecuted minorities there who could not speak out for themselves.

In 2017 Michael Nugent debated William Lane Craig in University College Cork on whether God exists. Michael argued that the idea of a god is incoherent, and that reality and morality look like we would expect if there was no God.

Atheist Ireland is a voluntary body with no paid staff. We don’t take state grants, in order to maintain our independence. Here is our committee from 2017.

Richard Dawkins is a wonderful populariser of science and atheism. He has made The God Delusion freely available online in Arabic. His current book of science writing is Books Do Furnish a Life.

In 2017 Atheist Ireland attended an International Conference in London on Freedom of Conscience and Expression organised by Maryam Namazie’s Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. The Conference honoured AC Grayling as a supporter.

Atheist Ireland works together with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and the Evangelical Alliance of Ireland to promote secular education and human rights. We each have very different world views but we work together on secular and human rights issues.

Atheist Ireland attends the annual International Days of Atheism in Poland with our colleagues from around the world. In 2017 Michael Nugent was awarded International Atheist of the Year, and in 2018 Jane Donnelly was awarded International Atheist and Feminist of the Year.

Unlike the Marriage Equality and Abortion referendums, which took place during pleasant May days, the Blasphemy referendum was during wet and cold late October 2018. Here’s one of Atheist Ireland’s final street canvasses in Dublin.

In 2018 Atheist Ireland addressed the Oireachtas Education Committee on sex education. We argued that objective sex education is a human right, and the law must be changed so that schools cannot deliver sex education through Catholic religious ethos.

In 2018 we finally achieved the referendum that we had been campaigning for to remove the blasphemy law. Professor David Nash of Oxford Brookes University, an expert on blasphemy laws globally, worked with us on this campaign.

Atheist Ireland was part of the successful Together For Yes coalition that removed the ban on abortion from the Irish Constitution. The referendum was passed in 2018, 35 years after the abortion ban was introduced at the height of Catholic dominance of Ireland.

Atheist Ireland held a tour of public meetings and street canvassing around Ireland during the blasphemy referendum campaign in 2018. This photo is from one of our information tables in Cork.

Here’s another of Atheist Ireland’s information table and street canvasses around the country during the blasphemy referendum campaign in 2018. This one is from Kerry.

26th October 2018 was the day of the Irish blasphemy referendum. This was the culmination of a decade of Atheist Ireland lobbying in Ireland and internationally to get the referendum called, then leading the Yes side of the referendum campaign itself.

At the blasphemy referendum count in 2018, Atheist Ireland met Minister for Justice Charles Flanagan, who had led the Government’s Vote Yes campaign. We were just hours away from finding out how many people supported freedom of expression in Ireland.

The blasphemy referendum count in 2018 continued after the Presidential election vote was counted and announced. As the night went on, Atheist Ireland members and the media were the only people waiting for the formal announcement of the referendum count.

On 26th October 2018 the people of Ireland voted by 65% to remove the offence of blasphemy from our constitution. Irish media could now stop self-censoring, and Islamist States at the UN could no longer use the Irish law to justify their own persecution of minorities.

Ten years since the Dublin Declaration

A decade ago, on Sunday the 5th of June 2011, the final session of the 3 day World Atheist Convention in Dublin was held.  At that session the Dublin Declaration was discussed and adopted. This addressed the role of secularism and the place of religion in public life.

Dublin Declaration

1. Personal Freedoms
(a) Freedom of conscience, religion and belief are private and unlimited. Freedom to practice religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights and freedoms of others.
(b) All people should be free to participate equally in the democratic process.
(c) Freedom of expression should be limited only by the need to respect the rights and freedoms of others. There should be no right ‘not to be offended’ in law. All blasphemy laws, whether explicit or implicit, should be repealed and should not be enacted.

2. Secular Democracy
(a) The sovereignty of the State is derived from the people and not from any god or gods.
(b) The only reference in the constitution to religion should be an assertion that the State is secular.
(c) The State should be based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Public policy should be formed by applying reason, and not religious faith, to evidence.
(d) Government should be secular. The state should be strictly neutral in matters of religion and its absence, favouring none and discriminating against none.
(e) Religions should have no special financial consideration in public life, such as tax-free status for religious activities, or grants to promote religion or run faith schools.
(f) Membership of a religion should not be a basis for appointing a person to any State position.
(g) The law should neither grant nor refuse any right, privilege, power or immunity, on the basis of faith or religion or the absence of either.

3. Secular Education
(a) State education should be secular. Religious education, if it happens, should be limited to education about religion and its absence.
(b) Children should be taught about the diversity of religious and nonreligious philosophical beliefs in an objective manner, with no faith formation in school hours.
(c) Children should be educated in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge. Science should be taught free from religious interference.

4. One Law For All
(a) There should be one secular law for all, democratically decided and evenly enforced, with no jurisdiction for religious courts to settle civil matters or family disputes.
(b) The law should not criminalise private conduct because the doctrine of any religion deems such conduct to be immoral, if that private conduct respects the rights and freedoms of others.
(c) Employers or social service providers with religious beliefs should not be allowed to discriminate on any grounds not essential to the job in question. Read online…

Calling concerned teachers