Letters

Schools, rights and religious instruction

State should heed UN body’s recommendations

Mon Feb 13 2023 - 00:04

Sir, – Atheist Ireland welcomes the 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 urged Ireland to remove all exceptions based on religion or ethos to children attending any school; to establish statutory guidelines to ensure children’s right not to attend religious classes; and to establish non-denominational schools as well as multi-denominational schools.

Atheist Ireland made these recommendations along with our colleagues in the Evangelical Alliance and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community of Ireland.

The UN Committee has also urged Ireland to to eliminate discrimination against children of minority faith or non-faith backgrounds; to ensure access of adolescent girls to free and safe abortion; and to integrate evidence-based sex education into mandatory school curriculums and teacher training.

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Specifically, the UN committee has urged Ireland to guarantee the right of all children to practise freely their religion or belief, including by:

(a) Amending the Education (Admission to Schools) Act 2018 and the Equal Status Acts to remove any exceptions to ensuring a child’s right to education in all primary and secondary schools based on religious or “ethos” grounds and to establish statutory guidelines to ensure children’s right not to attend religious classes;

(b) Developing a time-bound strategy, with adequate resources, for meeting its targets for increasing the availability of multi-denominational schools by 2030, and setting a target with a time-bound strategy and adequate resources for increasing the availability of non-denominational schools.

This report is another step towards equality in religion and belief in Irish schools.

Amending the Education (Admissions to Schools) Act 2018 and the Equal Status Acts will ensure that all children regardless of their religion or belief will have access to their local schools without religious discrimination. Currently non-Catholic primary schools and all secondary schools can discriminate in access based on religion, and all schools can refuse access to a five-year-old child if they say the child undermines the school’s ethos.

Having statutory guidelines on the right to not attend religious instruction will mean that the human and constitutional right to not attend religious instruction will be given practical application on the ground.

Currently children are left sitting in the religion class and are not supervised outside the class.

This concluding observation reflects Article 44.2.4 of the Irish Constitution which guarantees the right to not attend religious instruction and makes it a condition of State aid.

Providing non-denominational schools is the only way to provide secular education in Ireland. At present there are no non-denominational schools (as well as multi-denominational schools, which are religious schools). During follow-up questions in Geneva, the Irish State acknowledged that it has no plans to open any non-denominational schools. The UN has now specifically asked it to do this. – Yours, etc,

MICHAEL NUGENT,

Chairperson,

JANE DONNELLY,

Human Rights Officer,

Atheist Ireland,

Drumcondra,

Dublin 9.