The Irish State continues to help the Catholic Church to evangelise schoolchildren. In our education system, Church and State policy is to develop values to enable children to come to an understanding of the relevance of religion to their lives. Children are taught to respect religious beliefs and their codes ...
The NCCA is updating the sex education curriculum, but this will not matter if schools can deliver the content according to their religious ethos. They can do this because of the Education Act 1998. Atheist Ireland has raised this issue with the Oireachtas Education Committee and the United Nations. When the ...
Atheist Ireland has made the following submission to the NCCA on the Draft Primary Curriculum Framework. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Constitutional and Human Rights of Atheists 3. The 1999 Primary School Curriculum 4. The Draft Primary Curriculum Framework 5. The Recommendation from the Forum on Patronage on ERB & Ethics 6. ...
Most Irish schools insist that children, whose parents do not want them to attend religious instruction, must sit at the back of the class while religion is being taught. This is unconstitutional. Such children have the right to physically leave the classroom while religion is being taught. The inalienable rights ...
Atheist Ireland sent our recent Legal Opinion on the Constitutional Right to not attend religious instruction under Article 44.2.4 to the General Secretary of the ETBI Paddy Lavelle. The ETBI responded to us on behalf of all ETBs and claimed that the ETBI distinguishes between religious instruction and religious education. ...
The ETBs and the Catholic Bishops claim that they are legally obliged to promote the spiritual education of all students through religious education. They use this as a lobbying tactic with the Department of Education, in order to continue to evangelise, and to ensure that students that opt out of ...
The right to opt out of religion under the Irish Constitution is not confined to opting out of faith formation or any belief specific teaching. The Constitution does not use the words faith formation in relation to the rights of parents to opt out their children (Article 44.2.4). The Education ...
Atheist Ireland has published a major new report titled How State Schools Break The Rules. It explains how the Department of Education, the ETBs, and the NCCA are breaching Constitutional and Human Rights and the IHREC Act in Religious Education in ETB schools. We will be using this report as the ...
ETB schools are wrongly telling students that they cannot opt out of the State religious education course at second level, and are wrongly trying to justify that by referring to a misleading clarification of a directive from the Department of Education. In February last year the Department told ETB schools ...
There is a lot of confusion among parents and students in relation to the different types of religious education and religious instruction classes in Irish school at primary and second level. Here is a quick guide which we hope will give a better understanding of the basic principles in relation ...
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