Atheist Ireland is seeking public support for its Schools Equality PACT, an initiative to promote religious equality for all pupils and teachers in Irish schools.

PACT is the group’s acronym for Patronage, Access, Curriculum and Teaching, the four areas it says need change in order to achieve religious equality in schools.

“Children have a right to attend inclusive public schools, an equal right to attend their local public school, and a right to an objective critical and pluralist education.

“Teachers have an equal right to work in State-funded schools, based on merit and not on their religious beliefs,” the group said in a statement.

The statement said that “divesting some Catholic schools to new private patrons will not achieve pluralism in education”.

It said that the “maximum divestment of the 300 schools that Educate Together is seeking . . . would provide some relief for some mostly middle-class well-educated secular families, but most schools would still be in areas where there is only one Catholic school, and that school would not be divested”.

The statement also claimed that “the Catholic church wants to trade off divesting some schools, that they don’t have the resources to continue running, in exchange for a stronger Catholic ethos in the vast majority of schools that they want to retain.

“So most secular families would be left with an even stronger Catholic ethos in their only local publicly-funded school.”

‘Secularist elite’

The statement also recalled how Rev Prof Eamon Conway, head of theology and religious studies at Mary Immaculate College of Education in Limerick, had “recently suggested that Atheist Ireland is part of a ‘subcultural secularist elite’ influencing the education system.

“This invented bogeyman underlines how important the debate about the future of the Irish schools system is, both to the power of the Catholic church and to the human rights of atheists, secularists and minority faith members.

“The core question is this: should the State fund schools that treat all children, parents and teachers equally, or should it fund private bodies to control our schools based on their own ethos?”

The group said that atheists “have the same human rights as our religious neighbours to freedom of religion or belief, equality before the law, and freedom from discrimination.

“This year we raised these issues at the first-ever meeting in the history of the State between a Taoiseach and an atheist advocacy group.

“We are now meeting senior civil servants in follow-up meetings.”

The group also said that “eight separate UN and Council of Europe bodies have told Ireland that our schools breach the human rights of atheists and minority faith members”.