The State pays chaplains in ETB schools, who are mostly Catholic, to help parents with the religious education and religious formation of their children. This costs the state approximately €10 million per year.

The Supreme Court found that parents are responsible for the religious education and formation of their children, but that the State could help the parents do that by funding chaplains. This means that the purpose of school chaplains is religious. They are not, as some people think, merely an inclusive resource for the whole school community.

That role could be filled, and should be filled, by a counsellor appointed under a fair recruitment process. Instead, the local Bishop decides who will be a school chaplain. Can you imagine if the State paid ETB schools to employ an atheist, to help parents with the atheistic education of their children? We would never hear the end of it.

Atheist Ireland will continue to highlight this religious privilege towards Catholic parents in ETB schools. You can help us to continue this work by joining Atheist Ireland as a member, or by asking anybody who you think may be interested in joining us to do so. We are an entirely voluntary body with no paid staff, and we depend on our members to continue our work. You can join Atheist Ireland here.

The State pays Catholic and Church of Ireland Chaplains to help parents with the religious education and religious formation of their children. This funding costs the state approximately €10 million per year.
This is the purpose of the funding of Chaplains in ETB Community and Comprehensive Schools and designated Community Colleges. Most Chaplains are Catholic but some are Church of Ireland.
The Deeds of Trust for Community Colleges, and the Model Agreement for designated Community Colleges, state that the Chaplain must be nominated by the relevant religious authority. In the vast majority of cases that is the Catholic Church.
In 1996 a case was take to the courts regarding this funding. It was claimed that the funding of Chaplains was an endowment of religion, forbidden by the Constitution. The case went to the Supreme Court and in 1998 they found that this funding wasn’t an endowment of religion, because the State was helping parents with the religious education and religious formation of their children under Article 42.1, 42.4 and Article 44 of the Constitution.
The courts said that Community and Comprehensive schools were denominational in nature. They are either Catholic or Church of Ireland. They were open to all members of the community. The Catholic Church told the court that if the State didn’t fund Catholic Chaplains’ then they would be obliged to pay for them.
The Supreme Court recognised that teachers in Community schools were mostly lay teachers, and therefore it wasn’t practical to combine religious and academic education the way that a religious order might have done in the past.
The court found that, regardless of this, parents had the same right to have a religious education provided for their children, and they were not obliged to settle just for the religious instruction class.
This is the reason why Chaplains are funded by the State. Their very purpose is to assist Catholic and Church of Ireland parents with the religious education and faith formation of their children.
Justice Barrington went on to say that, if minority parents chose to send their children to Community or Comprehensive schools, they can expect them to be influenced to some degree by the religious ethos of these schools.
Community and Comprehensive schools, as well as designated Community Colleges, are presented as the alternative to denominational schools by the Department of Education.
So where does all this leave minorities in ETB schools and also in denominational schools?  Most parents have no choice where they send their children to school.
We are told that all parents have absolute Constitutional rights with regard to the education of their children, and that all schools are inclusive and promote diversity and pluralism.
We are asked to accept that inclusion, diversity and pluralism mean that our children can be influenced by a religious ethos in the general atmosphere of a school.
If religion is combined with academic subjects, this will be another avenue of religious influence, as well as our children being left in the religion class, because no supervision is provided outside the class.
Can you imagine if the State paid schools to employ an atheist, to assist parents with the atheistic education of their children, or to promote atheism in the general atmosphere of the school?
If that happened (which of course it shouldn’t), we would never hear the end of it. It would be seen as religious discrimination and undermining the rights of religious parents. It is the same when the State pays schools to employ a Catholic Chaplain to assist parents with the Catholic education of their children. Read online…

*|YOUTUBE: [$vid=XGLwj5QBYMA]|*

This week Atheist Ireland had a letter published in the Irish Times

Religious oaths and secular education – Atheist Ireland has repeatedly raised these issues with the UN

Sir, — The UN Human Rights Committee has again told 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 has also told Ireland to remove the religious oaths in the Constitution for people who take up senior public office positions, taking into account the right not to be compelled to reveal one’s thoughts or adherence to a religion or belief in public.
Atheist Ireland has repeatedly raised these three issues with the UN, and the Irish State has repeatedly told the UN that it will address them, but the Government never carries through on these commitments.
Indeed, Ireland misled the UN this year by saying the Government’s objective is to have 400 “multidenominational or non-denominational schools”. But this is not true. The programme for Government refers only to “multidenominational” schools.
What the UN has asked for is secular or non-denominational schools, which they explicitly refer to in this week’s concluding observations.
Atheist Ireland continues to promote these three fundamental human rights: the right to secular education through non-denominational schools; the right to teach in schools and work in hospitals without religious discrimination, and the right to be president, a judge, taoiseach, or tánaiste, without swearing a religious oath that a conscientious atheist could not take. — Yours, etc, Read online…

Atheist Ireland’s ‘notme.ie‘ is a place where people can publicly renounce the religion of their childhood. Currently there are 1935 symbolic defections. Many share their reasons for making a public symbolic defection which you can read here. 

Tell us what you think

Have you any feedback that you would like to give us on the Secular Sunday newsletter. What are we getting right? What could we improve on? Is there something you would like to see included? Drop us an email at secularsunday@atheist.ie.

Atheist Ireland is an entirely volunteer run organisation. We receive no grants or government funding to continue our campaign work. We rely entirely on membership fess and donations.

Annual membership is nominal; €25 waged, €10 unwaged/student and €40 for family membership. Please consider becoming a member. Membership means:

National

Warning by Archbishop on future of Catholic Church in Ireland

By Patsy McGarry

Podcasts, Videos and Interviews

Ireland

International

Ireland

• Adoption Authority says nearly 900 register their contact preference
• Letter to the Irish Times – A choice of oathsThe case for non-religious options

International

• UP: Kanpur school ‘forces’ students of all religions to recite ‘Kalma’ for ‘equality’; faces massive backlash
• Kansas puts abortion rights on the ballot in test case for US
• MSU professor Frank Ravitch analyzes the separation of church and state