Author: Michael Nugent

My father Michael Nugent died this week, after an inspirational 89 years of life. This is Michael speaking at my wedding to my late wife Anne Holliday in 2009. We got married in the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks in Dublin, where Anne had worked, and which was previously an army barracks, hence […]

Atheist Ireland is starting a new weekly email newsletter called Secular Sunday. It will include details of events, activities, news items and other relevant topics. If you would like to subscribe, just send an email to our editor Derek Walsh at secularsunday@atheist.ie. The first issue, which you can read here, reviews our main activities during […]

Cee Lo Green was wrong to subvert the lyrics of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ when ringing in the new year, and NBC was wrong to allow him to do this. He subverted the meaning of a controversial song because he disagreed with its core message of atheism, and he did this at a public event that […]

Here’s a video interview that I did last week with Randall Calvin for skyzthelimi7 and Atheism TV. We discuss the formation and activities of Atheist Ireland, our campaigns for secular education and against the Irish blasphemy law, and the difference between religious and secular faith and dogma.

The Irish Independent today published this article that I wrote about the human right to a secular education. It includes the key points that Atheist Ireland made in our response to the interim report of the Forum for Patronage and Pluralism in Irish Education. The final report will be given to the Minister for Education […]

More than eight in every ten Irish people want the church and state to be totally separate, 65% strongly agree that this should happen, and less than three in ten have quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in religious groups. That’s according to a survey of 1,242 people conducted in June for […]

This is part of a talk that I gave last night at a debate in NUI Maynooth on the motion ‘That This House Would Kill God.’ I argued that I would not kill God if he existed, as I don’t believe in capital punishment, but that, as he is a fictional character, I would write […]

This is my talk last night at the debate in Queens University Belfast, supporting the motion that Religion has Poisoned Politics on the Island of Ireland. It also includes some points that I made not in the speech but in the questions and answers. Thank you for inviting me. On the way in, I saw […]

Back in the 1960s, when I was in primary school in Drumcondra in Dublin, we were given a project to do over the Easter holiday. We had to read the Gospels, and rewrite them in our own words. I spent ages doing this, rewriting the stories and drawing pictures to accompany them. Midway through doing […]

Atheist Ireland is hosting a series of occasional lectures by prominent atheists. Here is a video of the first one, with Professor AC Grayling, speaking last month in Dublin.