Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have now published their arrangement for Fianna Fail supporting a Fine Gael led minority government. This arrangement does not mention human rights breaches such as religious discrimination in the education system and the need for secular schools, the blasphemy law, religious oaths for political and judicial office, or the State’s […]
The UN will ask Ireland next week about secular education and our blasphemy law, matching recommendations that Atheist Ireland successfully lobbied for in our meetings in Geneva last month. For the first time, Ireland will be specifically asked about replacing the school patronage system with an inclusive secular one. Atheist Ireland highlighted that the Oireachtas Education Committee […]
What might have happened if Padraig Pearse, instead of being executed by the British after the 1916 Rising, had been put on trial before a judge and jury? TV3 is asking this question in a three-part programme this weekend. At 9.15 pm today and tomorrow, they will dramatise this imagined trial, with Love/Hate’s Tom Vaughan-Lawlor […]
Here are 20 great lessons that I learned from each of the speakers at the Rationalist International Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, last weekend.
My talk at the Rationalist International Conference in Tallinn, Estonia, last Sunday. Covers secularism in Ireland, challenging the silencing word Islamophobia, promoting robust civil dialogue, normalising the word atheism, promoting human rights and ethical secular democracy.
This Sunday is Census Day. If you are not religious, tick the No Religion box. Don’t just answer with your childhood religion. The census data is used to support religious discrimination, so please answer the question accurately. Please share this between now and Sunday.
I had a really interesting chat with Stephen Knight on the Godless Spellchecker podcast. We discussed atheism, secularism, ‘the troubles’, abortion law, blasphemy law, online smears, Educate Together, eating animals, the Irish census and more. You can listen to it here.
Atheist Ireland today published the following statement: In a parallel to the ongoing pattern of regressive groups ‘disinviting’ and ‘no-platforming’ speakers with whom they disagree, the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair has unilaterally broken an agreement with Atheist Ireland that we would host an information stall at their event last weekend. They thus prevented people attending the […]
Bengali lawyer and scholar Mufassil Islam has left Islam, courageously describing his former religion as a mafia cult of death. This is significant, as Mufassil is well-versed in Islam and he used to actively defend it. I debated Mufassil in 2013 in Trinity College Dublin, in an event organised by the TCD Theological Society. Despite […]
I had a discussion on Politics.ie today about atheism and Atheist Ireland. I’m reproducing here some of the responses I made to comments about atheism and Atheist Ireland policy. Myth 1 – Atheism is a religion Atheism is not a religion. It is either a belief that gods do not exist, or an absence of belief that […]