Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The news from Ireland last weekend is not just good, it is excellent. Nestled amongst the details are two truly outstanding results. One is the presidential election, and the other concerns blasphemy. A progressive candidate was reelected by a landslide as President of Ireland The absurd Blasphemy law has been officially obliterated from the Irish … Read more
If you read some reports of the visit to Ireland by Pope Francis you perhaps get the impression that the visit was a resounding success. We have headlines such as … Irish Times: Up to 500,000 expected at Pope Francis’ Phoenix Park Mass Telegraph: Live: The Pope holds mass for 500,000 in Ireland The official website also … Read more
It might be temping to consider the 1916 Easter Rising to be part of a story that is one step on the road to the birth of a new democratic nation struggling to throw off the chains of oppression, but this is simply not what actually happened at all. This weekend the Irish state is making a … Read more
Atheist Ireland reports on the latest developments … It is increasingly clear that the Catholic Church will not divest any schools to other patron bodies unless they are forced to do so. In fact they have reinforced their position of opposing human rights standards in education, by rejecting the Toledo Guiding Principles. Even Prof John Coolahan … Read more
Ireland rather absurdly has a Blasphemy law, and this is not some archaic dictate inherited from the dark ages, but was introduced in July 2009 by the then Fianna Fáil-led government. Enacting something like this as recently as 2009 would appear to be truly bizarre, because nobody was demanding it should happen, and nobody was particularly bothered about the lack … Read more
Now here is a small snippet of potentially good news, it has been officially announced that Ireland will indeed now hold a vote on their rather silly Blasphemy law. The report on this reads … Junior Minister Aodhán Ó’Ríordáin told the Dáil: The Government accepts the main recommendation of the [Constitutional Convention], which is that a … Read more