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 Irish schools. Our Recommendations The ...
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 ...
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 Committee has also told Ireland ...
Since last December, Atheist Ireland has been lobbying to vindicate the constitutional right to not attend religious instruction in schools, and to uphold parental authority in the education of their children, which the Supreme Court has described as a foundational pillar of the Constitution. As well as lobbying individual politicians ...
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 a gathering of Christian Brothers ...
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 multi-denominational primary schools by 2030. ...
Since last year Atheist Ireland has been raising the issue of the misuse of public funds in Irish schools that do not respect the constitutional condition of state funding that children have a right to not attend religious instruction. Following the Minister for Education's recent misleading Dail reply about this, ...
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 of publicly funded primary schools ...
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 phrases have no basis in ...
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: Article 41.1 and 42.1 “The ...