Atheist Ireland welcomes today’s census report on religion published by the Central Statistics Office. We are increasingly optimistic that a secular Ireland is inevitable, free of religious privilege and religious discrimination against any citizens.
The census results on religion broke a significant barrier – more Irish people now have no religion (468,400) than members of all minority religions combined (439,000). That should encourage more atheists to stand up for our rights, particularly in the education system, and to support equal treatment for everyone, regardless of religious or nonreligious beliefs.
Another 125,300 people declined to answer the religion question. Some of the ‘not stated’ may be religious, but certainly not all of them. So the actual figure for No Religion, whatever it is, is over 10%. Also, in Dublin City, Dun Laoghaire and Galway, more than one in three of the population is non-Catholic.
I gave this talk yesterday at the TCD Law Review Panel. The other speakers were Dr Ali Selim, William Richardson and Neville Cox.
I will start by welcoming that the Government is finally proposing a date for a referendum to remove the offence of blasphemy from our Constitution, nearly a decade after Dermot Ahern surprised everyone by adding a new definition of blasphemy, at the last minute, into the revised Defamation Act.
There has been a lot of revisionism about this law. Some defenders claim that it was designed to be unenforceable, but the opposite is true. It was designed specifically to satisfy legal advice that the Government was obliged to make the Constitutional offence enforceable.
I gave these two talks in Paris last Saturday at the Congress of the International Association of Free Thought. The first is on religious discrimination versus human rights, and the second is on promoting the right to die.
I delivered this talk today at the seventh Congress of the International Association of Freethought in Paris, France. I am particularly pleased to speak here in Paris about the right to die. I first got involved with the Right to Die movement eight years ago, when my late wife Anne Holliday was diagnosed with terminal […]
I delivered this talk today at the seventh Congress of the International Association of Freethought in Paris, France. Atheist Ireland has two aspects to our work. The first part of our work is that we promote atheism and reason over supernaturalism and superstition. When doing this, we engage with the general public, and we disagree […]
This week I debated Father Tony Flannery at the NUI Galway Literary and Debating Society. Tony is a priest who has been silenced by the Vatican for speaking out on theological matters. Here is video of my opening contribution. Here is video of all of my and Tony’s speeches. I will add video of the […]
Atheist Ireland has prepared a comprehensive report on how Tipperary Education and Training Board (ETB), through its Central Technical Institute (CTI) in Clonmel, is failing in its statutory obligation to promote and protect the rights of minorities in their schools, based on the details of a recent case at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC). You can […]
On Newstalk this morning, I and former Senator Joe O’Toole discussed Joe’s recent article in the Irish Times, which claimed that Ireland has swapped authoritarian Catholicism for totalitarian atheism.
Atheist Ireland welcomes today’s census report on religion published by the Central Statistics Office. We are increasingly optimistic that a secular Ireland is inevitable, free of religious privilege and religious discrimination against any citizens.
