I’m starting to blog again, two years after a fall and a rare neurological condition changed my life. Here’s what happened, and why I’m more grateful than ever to be alive. I’ve returned to my voluntary work with Atheist Ireland, and I’ll be writing here and on SubStack, about happiness, humour, reason, atheism, and secular […]
Atheist Ireland has obtained figures from the CSO showing the 62 types of wedding ceremonies in Ireland in 2022. They range from Roman Catholic to the Rites of Passage of the Indigenous Wisdom Tradition of Celtic Druid Temple. Only about 44% were some variation of what would currently be considered traditional religions. Four in ten […]
One in five Irish weddings last year were spiritualist ceremonies, according to information obtained by Atheist Ireland last week. This is twice the number you would think from the published CSO statistics, which hide half of the spiritualist marriages under the label ‘other religious’. This means fewer than 45% of Irish weddings last year were […]
The number of Catholic weddings has recovered from its dramatic drop during Covid, and has returned to the pattern of steady decline that has been happening for the past decade. In the decade since 2012, the percentage of Catholic weddings has dropped from 65.2% to 40.5%, and nonreligious weddings (civil registry and humanist) have risen […]
The Artificial Intelligence app ChatGPT wrote me a nursery rhyme about God, but it would not write me a nursery rhyme about atheism, because it said it cannot generate inappropriate or sensitive content. We had a lengthy discussion about AI training data, freedom of religion or belief, discrimination, and ethics. ChatGPT then said it now […]
My brother Billy died forty years ago today. He was nineteen, two years younger than me. We grew up in the new Willow Park estate in Ballymun, as the nearby flats were being built. Our parents loved and supported us and our younger siblings. As children, Billy and I splashed in the same bath and […]
I grew up in a homogeneous Ireland that was stiflingly conservative, dominated by the ethos of Eamon de Valera and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. For decades, I have campaigned for a liberal Ireland that values everybody’s individuality and rights. I also want to see a liberal world with the same values. That means helping those […]
Atheist Ireland welcomes today’s concluding observations about Ireland from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. We were in Geneva last month when the Committee questioned Ireland, and the Committee has made all of the recommendations we asked for. The UN has told Ireland to remove all exceptions based on religious or […]
If you are in Belfast on Tuesday 21 March, I and David Quinn will be discussing how to disagree respectfully as part of the Imagine! Belfast Festival of Ideas & Politics. The event is at lunchtime in The Green Room at the Black Box on Hill Street, and you can book tickets here. As a […]
An entire comedy movie, My Cousin Vinnie, is built on a police officer asking an innocent person when he shot a clerk. He responds in surprise ‘I shot the clerk?’, and the police officer later reads the statement to the court deadpan as ‘I shot the clerk’. There was a similar level of misrepresentation at […]