by Michael Nugent on July 18, 2018
Atheist Ireland welcomes the published wording of the proposed amendment of the Constitution on around 25 October to repeal the offence of blasphemy.
Atheist Ireland will be meeting this afternoon with officials in the Department of Justice, to clarify any technical or logistical questions that we have.
We will then commence our fourteen-week campaign in support of repealing the offence. We have already held an initial planning meeting in Galway with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of Ireland, who also support repeal.
We support the right of everybody to hold their religious or nonreligious beliefs, and to have their safety as individuals protected by the law. We also support the right of everybody to criticise the content of religious or nonreligious beliefs.
If you would like to help with our campaign, please email us at humanrights@atheist.ie.
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by Michael Nugent on July 15, 2018
Twenty years ago this weekend, my wife Anne and I were in Paris to watch the 1998 World Cup final. It remains the culmination of my football-watching life. Nothing since has matched the scale of the atmosphere of seeing the inspired French defeat the magical Brazilians before a passionate home crowd to capture the world’s biggest sporting prize.
Our day had two unexpected moments. Traveling across on the Eurostar train, we were woken from our snoozing by a loud Scottish voice asking about tickets. I assumed it was a ticket inspector. It was a drunk Tommy Docherty, the former Manchester United manager. He wanted to watch the final somewhere in Paris, and was optimistically asking passengers if they had spare tickets.
I wore a nostalgia-trip outfit of my plain white early seventies Leeds shirt with the blue-stitched owl badge, topped off with my old red-and-white Bohemians scarf. That outfit caused the French police to search me at the railway station, and when I caught up with my wife Anne she was sitting on the ground, chatting to former England World Cup winner Nobby Stiles about his visits to Dublin. Anne photographed Nobby autographing my match programme.
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by Michael Nugent on July 11, 2018
The Education (Admissions to Schools) Bill has now passed in the Dail. From September the vast majority of schools will no longer be able to discriminate in entry on the grounds of religion. However, minority religious schools can still continue to discriminate as they still have exemptions from equality laws.
Atheist Ireland has been campaigning for ten years to remove this religious discrimination, since we were founded in 2008. We have raised it repeatedly with the Irish Government, at the United Nations, and with other human rights regulatory bodies. We therefore welcome part but not all of this Bill.
Atheist Ireland will continue to campaign to remove all religious discrimination in publicly funded schools in Ireland, in the four areas of our Schools Equality PACT — Patronage, Access, Curriculum, and Teaching. It is essential that all four of these areas are tackled simultaneously. This requires amendment of the Education Act and other Acts.
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by Michael Nugent on July 8, 2018
Joe Davis, one of Atheist Ireland’s earliest and most-loved members, died this week. For most of his life, he felt like an outsider as an atheist living in Ireland, and he was delighted to have found a like-minded community when Atheist Ireland was founded a decade ago. We were delighted to have had the privilege of knowing such an honourable man.
Joe was kind, philosophical, conscientious, well-read, and funny. He loved to talk for hours on the nuances of atheism, religion, history, sociology, economics, and politics. He regularly turned up to Atheist Ireland events with CDs that he had recorded of philosophical interviews or debates, and shared them with those of us who had not heard them.
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