At the conclusion of Catholic Schools Week, Bishop Leo O’Reilly has
slammed the Irish Human Rights Commission (IRHC) over its attitude to
religious education and religious schools.
The IRHC recently issued a discussion paper on the subject of
religious education and human rights.
The paper suggested that
religious schools might be violating international human rights law
because the ethos of a religious school will permeate the whole day,
meaning the child of an atheist won’t be able to escape the ethos merely
by being exempted from religion class.
Speaking on Monday in the Cathedral of SS Patrick and Felim in Cavan,
Bishop O’Reilly said that the right of one person not to have religion
is not more important than the right of the other 99 to have it.
He
said that the IHRC believed that “freedom of religion means freedom from
religion.”
Bishop O’Reilly stated, “The Irish Human Rights Commission has
produced a discussion paper recently which claims that because most of
the schools in the country are Catholic, then atheists are being
discriminated against because the only school convenient to them is a
Catholic one. This was highlighted by the case of a man in Dromahaire
who got a lot of media attention last week because he took his son out
of the local Catholic school.”
"He didn’t want his son to learn any religion so his son was excused
from the religion classes.
But his complaint was that his son was
picking up the prayers that the other children were saying even outside
the religion class.”
He continued, “For him and for the Irish Human Rights Commission,
freedom of religion means freedom from religion. They believe that if
one person in the school doesn’t want religion then there should be no
religion in the school.”
"The right of that one person not to have religion is more important
than the rights of the other 99 to have it. It is a strange
understanding of human rights but it’s the one favoured by most people
in the media world."