A controversial conference on the challenges faced by Christianity in Ireland takes place next week in Maynooth. The conference, "Chesterton's Ireland Then and Now - A Call for Re-Evangelisation", was cancelled last year because of the September 11th attacks on the US.
The commentator John Cooney, who had been listed as one of the speakers last year, wrote later in the British Catholic weekly, the Tablet, that the cancellation was a good thing as the conference had sinister overtones of imported right-wing fundamentalism.
The conference will be held in St Patrick's College next weekend, September 13th-15th.
Mr Cooney's claim was vigorously denied in further correspondence with the Tablet by the conference organiser, Dr Dermot Quinn, associate professor of history at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, US, and a director of the G.K. Chesterton Institute there, as well as by the journalist Mary Kenny, also listed as a speaker last year.
Ms Kenny is listed as a speaker again this year, along with the former Catholic primate, Cardinal Cahal Daly, who is also the conference patron.
Other speakers include: the former Taoiseach, Dr Garret FitzGerald; Prof Owen Dudley Edwards, of the history department at Edinburgh University; Father Oliver Rafferty SJ, of St Patrick's College, Maynooth; Dr Sheridan Gilley, of the University of Durham; and Father Ian Boyd, former professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and editor of the Chesterton Review; and Dr Quinn. Father Liam Ryan, professor of sociology at Maynooth, is unable to take part this year.
Dr Quinn said that "as a small gesture of defiance we are running almost exactly the same programme at exactly the same time" as last year when - due to the events of September 11th and the fact that the planned conference opening day would have coincided with Ireland's national day of mourning - "no one had much appetite for it".
He described Mr Cooney's Tablet article as " an unpleasant, actually somewhat bizarre, piece" and described what he claimed about the conference as nonsense.
He said Chesterton had recognised Ireland as a model Christian nation and had been "greatly moved by her long tradition of fidelity to the Gospel. Our conference will examine reasons for faith and for loss of faith, confident that in time the former will once again triumph over the latter."
Those interested in attending the conference should contact Ms Bernadette Kealey at 01- 4935304, or kealeym@indigo.ie
