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Atheist Ireland ★ Every child has a right to an objective, critical and pluralistic education. That right is guaranteed under Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention.

12-July-2026

It is an absolute right, not to be balanced against the rights of others or one that can be gradually achieved.

Atheist Ireland is campaigning for this human right in Ireland and for the state to guarantee it in practice and in law. It doesn’t matter what school a child attends: Educate Together, ETBs, Catholic, Church of Ireland etc. They still have this right.

At present the Irish State does not guarantee this right in any school. Our children leave this right at the school gate no matter what school they attend. Look at the Education Act 1998 and the Equal Status Act, and you will see this right is not guaranteed.

All schools claim they are inclusive. They each have their own Patron’s programmes to reflect their ethos. None of these courses are inspected by the state to ensure compliance with the European Convention. The Patron bodies themselves are not obliged to guarantee an objective, critical and pluralistic education to every child in their schools.

The State is well aware that it cannot absolve itself from its responsibility under the Convention, and delegate it to private bodies such as Patron bodies. It learnt that the hard way in the Louise O’Keeffe case at the European Court.

Transferring some schools to different ethos patron bodies would not solve this problem. That would merely redistribute the discrimination, by privileging a larger number of different belief groups. And it is impossible in practice to open enough schools to reflect every belief group in every local area around the country.

Also, including more multi-denominational schools within that approach would not solve the problem. That would merely segregate the children of non-religious or minority faith parents into a catch-all type of school while larger belief groups remain privileged. And in any case, multi-denominational schools do not guarantee the right to an objective, critical and pluralistic education.

The UN has repeatedly told Ireland to open both multi-denominational and non-denominational schools. The Irish government initially said it would do this, but has since dropped the provision of non-denominational schools from its agenda.

Multiple patronage and multiple ethos as the basis for policy is the underlying problem in Irish schools, not the solution. The Oireachtas Education Committee has already concluded that plurality of patronage cannot create pluralism in education. Instead it brings about segregation of children and inequality.

The only thing that can solve this problem is for the State to fund a network of schools, that all children can attend in their locality, that provide an objective, critical and pluralistic education. The state is responsible for making this happen, and is abdicating its duty to do so.

It seems to us that the state will do nothing until someone takes them to the courts. Atheist Ireland is preparing to take such a case with the support of the Law Library’s Voluntary Assistance scheme. We will continue to campaign for our human rights.

⏩ Follow Atheist Ireland on X @atheistie

Every Child Has A Right To An Objective, Critical, And Pluralistic Education 🪶 The State Is Responsible

The Volunteer ★ Written by Chris Ealham, Recommended by Christopher Owens.

Stuart Christie, who died in August 2020, was best known as the 18-year-old Scottish anarchist who, in the summer 1964, was part of an attempt to assassinate General Francisco Franco. It was only the beginning of a long life dedicated to left-wing activism.

By the time Stuart Christie volunteered to transport explosives for the 1964 plot to kill Franco at the Santiago Bernabeu soccer stadium in Madrid, his acquaintance with anarchism in the UK had been building for some time. As he explains in his entertaining memoir General Franco Made Me A Terrorist (2003), he had also been in touch with Spanish exile circles in France. Yet before the attack could be carried out, Christie was arrested by undercover Spanish police.

Born into a working-class family in Glasgow, he had come into contact with local anarchist groups in his earliest youth and began reaching out to libertarians around the world. His association with the Spaniards during the 1960s was overshadowed by the execution in Spain, in August 1963, of Francisco Granado and Joaquín Delgado, anarchists from the Libertarian Youth. He would subscribe to the working-class anarchist tradition for the rest of his life.

Continue @ The Volunteer.

Stuart Christie’s Unending Struggle

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Kyle Mantyla.

Sean Feucht Says God Orchestrated His Failed Congressional Bid To Prepare To Defy Covid Lockdowns


In 2020, Christian nationalist worship leader and right-wing political activist Sean Feucht ran for Congress in California because he said he had been called by God to bring revival and reformation to the nation. Yet despite having the support of many leading religious-right activists, Feucht finished a distant third in the primary election, receiving fewer than half as many votes as the other Republican candidate in the race

Last week, Feucht appeared on "The Strang Report," where he claimed to have realized in retrospect that God had called him to run for Congress not to win, but rather to give him a "peek behind the veil of government" in preparation for leading a series of lockdown-defying rallies throughout the country amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"[I] really felt the Lord called me to run," Feucht said. 

I felt like obviously God told me to run because I was gonna win. I'm like, why else would he tell me to do this? But I was in California and running in a very—they said it was a purple district . . . 

Continue @ RWW.

God Interfered In Elections

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Sixty Three

 

Pastords @ 57

 

A Morning Thought @ 3235

Shaun Harkin ➤ The Sinn Féin First Minister's justification of the Bogside bonfire pre-dawn raid as dealing with anti-social behaviour is completely hypocritical in the face of what we have witnessed this summer - and completely counterproductive.


There was no pre-dawn raid on the Moygashel bonfire featuring a replica mosque. There was no pre-dawn raid last year when the Moygashel bonfire had a boat with migrants for burning.

There was no police action in response to many 12th of July bonfires dripping with explicit racism, sectarianism and bigotry that are openly organised by loyalist paramilitaries.
 
There was no raids on loyalist bonfires that were clear health and safety risks that led to serious injuries and the burning of homes.
 
I'm not a fan of any bonfires in the North that celebrate sectarianism or come in response to sectarianism. We don't have a celebratory 'burning man' bonfire culture here. We'd be better off with no bonfires at all.
 
That said, I completely understand the frustrations of young people in the Bogside who have been demonised and criminalised for organising a bonfire.
 
For all the rantings of Jamie Bryson about how unionist culture is done down, what happened in the Bogside looks like a blatant example of two-tier policing, two-tier treatment and discrimination.
 
It has left young people, and others, in the Bogside and beyond feeling resentful.
 
Counterproductive is the only way to describe what this will have achieved.
 
I attended the Féile meeting on 25 years of the PSNI in Culturlann where example after example of failed policing and failed mechanisms for accountability went unchallenged by anyone on the top table or in the room. The police relentlessly seek legitimacy and normalisation but their actions produce cynicism, distrust and anger.
 
Cllr Gary Donnelly said he had urged young people not to take their frustrations and anger out on the Fountain because that is exactly what some want.
 
The Good Friday Agreement cemented sectarianism into political institutions. Two-tier and failed policing is emblematic of Stormont's institutionalising of sectarianism.
 
Sectarianism benefits elites. It divides the working-class. Those who benefit from working-class division will work forever to keep it alive.
 
Sectarianism can't be policed away. Demonising and blaming young people and their parents will not challenge sectarianism. It needs to be fully challenged and that starts with the role of the British state, Stormont, its institutions and the police.

⏩Shaun Harkin is a councillor in Foyleside.

Demonising And Blaming Young People

Anthony McIntyre ☠ The latest rant from Brass neck Bibi has been hurled in the direction of the UK government. 

It came during a podcast interview conducted by Avi Harush, a former IDF officer whose terrorist son was killed in April 2024 during the Palestinian fightback against genocide in Gaza. 

Speaking to his host, Netanyahu referred to the UK as the Islamic Republic of Britain. Were anybody to claim that Britain because of its support under Starmer for Israeli war crimes was the Jewish Republic of Britain, they would have been immediately howled down by the Jewish Chronicle and others as antisemites who should be whipped into silence through the lash of cancel culture. He was rightly trashed for his hatemongering by several British Jews. 

Netanyahu's remark was gleefully reported in the Daily Mail, once the stable of trenchant Zionist Melanie Philips who wrote the book Londonistan. The self explanatory sentiment in that work has been regurgitated by Netanyahu who bemoaned what he felt was a loss of support for Israel within the UK. Praising the son of Winston Churchill, Randolph, for describing the six day war of 1967, in which Zionist colonialism occupied and stole more land, as positive, Netanyahu complained:

Just try to find that kind of attitude in Britain now – or in what's known as "The Islamic Republic of Britain". You won't find it . . . 'Someone said – you know – that the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic Republic of Britain.

A man who promotes himself as an intellectual curiously manages to overlook that Pakistan has possessed nuclear weaponry since the 1990s.

Netanyahu's hateful sentiment towards Muslims chimes with a similar comment made in 2024 by JD Vance during that year's presidential campaign in which he suggested that the UK could become the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon”.

This is right wing racist discourse and recognised as such by the Irish Times in its observation on Netanyahu's slur that it:

played into a common far-right Islamophobic trope about Britain’s small Muslim population . . . London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has also been a frequent target of racialised attacks from right-wing leaders abroad, including Donald Trump, seeking to gain political advantage from Islamophobic lies.

And while there are Christless Christians seeking to pass themselves as preachers of Christian love, such as Chris Hudson, who praise the Israeli state at the very moment it is inflicting genocide with the words 'Isn't that little Jewish state amazing?' - imagine proclaiming Isn't that little German state amazing? during the Holocaust  - what is really amazing is how a body of people who make the Holocaust such a huge part of its own history has itself come to commit genocide. 


This is why it is not hyperbole to describe the Israeli state as Nazi. A regime that commits genocide is not best positioned to refute allegations levelled against it of being Nazi. If the victim of a paedophile abuses children, they too become paedophiles. Britain for all its faults much less fits the description Islamic Republic of Britain than Israel does the description Nazi Republic of Israel. 

It is not an antisemitic trope to describe Israel as such. The Jewish Independent observed in 2004 that:

Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli intellectual of such stature that streets in Jerusalem and Herziiya have been named after him, coined the term ‘Judeo-Nazis’ decades ago, when warning against the rise in Israel of an extremist minority of a kind found in many societies. Is his warning relevant again now?

The answer is yes. It is as relevant now as it was in the years 1933 to 1945 when the wheels of the Holocaust started rolling, eventually arriving at its death camp destination.  

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

The Nazi Republic Of Israel

Pádraig Drummond ✊ With A Timeline By Way Of An Obituary Nobody Asked For.


Ten years, a full decade of the National Party.

Ten glorious years of flags, fury, factional warfare and the sort of organisational chaos usually associated with a GAA club committee after three pints and an argument about the raffle.

And how better to celebrate a tenth anniversary than with another spectacular internal explosion? Some political organisations mark ten years by producing housing programmes, organising workers, building community campaigns, developing serious economic policies and offering people some vision of the future. The National Party apparently marks ten years by eating itself; Again!
.
Cllr Patrick Quinlan's latest statement reads less like the declaration of a political movement preparing to transform Ireland and more like the minutes of a particularly dysfunctional WhatsApp group that somehow acquired a flag, a constitution and delusions of national importance. Leaders resign. Leaders return. Leaders are removed. Leaders are reinstated. Membership lists disappear into the fog. Emails become strategic assets. Social-media accounts apparently require diplomatic negotiations. And somewhere in the middle of all this, an important leadership decision is apparently being settled by telephone polling. Democracy by group chat. This is the organisation that presumably wants to save Ireland.
 
Ten years, a whole fucking decade. And after all that time, what have they actually built? Where is the serious housing programme? Where is the workers' programme? Where is the healthcare strategy? Where is the plan for education, public transport, childcare, addiction services or rebuilding communities gutted by poverty and deprivation? Where is the economic programme explaining who pays, who benefits and what exactly they intend to do once the flags come down and somebody hands them the keys to the country?

There is remarkably little there to argue with because there is remarkably little there. Instead we get the same tired political magic trick: take a complicated social problem, point at somebody poorer or more vulnerable, preferably somebody foreign, and scream until nobody notices who actually owns the fucking building.

Ireland has a housing crisis? Blame migrants. Rents are unaffordable? Blame migrants. Public services are collapsing? Blame migrants. Communities are being abandoned? Somehow, once again, blame migrants. It is a magnificent political con because it costs absolutely nothing. You don't have to confront landlords. You don't have to confront investment funds. You don't have to confront developers. You don't have to confront governments that spent decades treating housing as an investment commodity instead of a human necessity. You simply point sideways.

And there it is: the great genius of reactionary politics. It costs nothing to hate sideways. It costs everything to organise upwards.

There is nothing remotely radical about turning workers against one another because of nationality, ethnicity or immigration status. Irish history should have beaten that particular disease out of us generations ago. Our own people were scattered across the world by famine, poverty, colonialism and economic necessity. Irish emigrants were not universally greeted abroad with open arms and a complimentary three-bedroom house.

The working-class tradition worth defending is not one built around bloodlines and passports. It is solidarity. The person working beside you might have been born in Dublin, Donegal, Lagos, Warsaw or Damascus. If you're both being exploited by the same landlord, squeezed by the same cost of living and working for wages that barely cover the rent, you've got considerably more in common than the flag-waving nationalists would like you to believe.

Your enemy isn't the family arriving with two suitcases. It's the landlord collecting the rent. It's the investment fund buying housing. It's the employer squeezing wages. It's the government refusing to build enough homes. It's the economic system that can find billions for property speculation while telling ordinary people there simply isn't enough money for a secure home. That is the fight. But apparently the National Party has spent ten years looking in precisely the wrong direction.

And now, on its tenth birthday, we have another split. There is something almost poetic about it. Ten years spent proclaiming the coming nationalist revolution, only to discover that the revolutionary vanguard's most dangerous enemy is apparently the bloke sitting in the next chair. You couldn’t write a better satire.

The party cannot apparently agree on who is allowed to lead it, who possesses the membership list, who controls the communications machinery or how its own internal decisions should be made, yet somehow expects the rest of the country to believe it possesses the organisational genius required to transform an entire state. This isn't the disciplined nationalist movement promised in the propaganda. It's a group chat with a flag pinned to it.

And perhaps that is the real tragedy beneath the comedy. Because Ireland's working class deserves better than this. People sleeping on the streets deserve better. Families trapped in emergency accommodation deserve better. Young workers handing half their wages to landlords deserve better. People waiting years for healthcare deserve better. Communities destroyed by poverty and addiction deserve better. And migrants and refugees who have come here looking for safety deserve better than being turned into political scapegoats for failures they did not create. They deserve politics that actually fights for them. Not politics that tells them to fight each other.

So happy tenth anniversary to the National Party. Ten years on the road to absolutely fucking nowhere. Ten years of splitting, resigning, returning, expelling, issuing statements about statements and apparently conducting revolutionary democracy through the holy sacrament of the WhatsApp poll.

The great nationalist revolution has not stormed the barricades. It appears to have misplaced the membership list somewhere between the Ard Chomhairle and the group chat. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still waiting for the houses. Maybe, after another ten years, they'll finally get around to building one.

Written in solidarity with every worker, every homeless person, every migrant and every ordinary human being this crowd has ever tried to turn against their neighbour instead of the people who actually hold the fucking power.

⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.

Leader And President Resigns, Un-resigns, Gets Voted Off Anyway

Dixie Elliot ✊So Celtic Symphony is now classified as 'an inappropriate song' in some quarters, meaning that Unionists have identified it as a song about the 'IRA'.


The same Unionists who have no problem about saying that they consult with two of the leading drug gangs in the North, the UDA and the UVF. Who have shared platforms with the likes of Billy Wright at a time when he and his gang were murdering innocent Catholics.
 
They are constantly on the alert to find offense in anything remotely Irish or Republican, even the Irish language offends them, as do GAA clubs named after Republicans and of course songs.
 
Yet they have bands named after Loyalist killers singing sectarian songs and have multiple flags flying from single lamp posts; the purpose of which is to cause offense. In particular the Para flags on the road into Derry. Their culture is based entirely on sectarian hatred.
 
They constantly say, 'so this or that is what we have to expect in a United Ireland' while at the same time they say they'll never be part of any United Ireland.
 
The food outlet, 'The Hatch' issued a statement apologising for accidently playing 'Celtic Symphony' as it caused 'offense'. They described it as an 'inappropriate song'.
 
They also stated that they showed the playlist to the event organisers who recognised the innocence of the mistake.
 
However, after the 'controversy', in recent years, over the Wolfe Tones concert at that year's Fleadh, which included the same song, 'Celtic Symphony,' Danny Morrison said that the festival hosted many acts over the years and has never censored any speaker or artist and criticism of the Wolfe Tones' music rings hollow... etc.

Has this now changed I wonder?

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Celtic Symphony

Patricia Devlin ✍ There is a human being behind every headline. 

We should never need a death to remind us of that.

But here we are again - this time it’s Jason Arday.

We need to be capable of holding two truths at the same time.

He had questions to answer. Serious ones. The allegations against him deserved scrutiny. That is what journalism is supposed to do.

But there is a difference between holding someone to account and hounding them.

Day after day, story after story, allegation after allegation - the coverage, particularly from the Daily Mail, felt relentless. At times it even crossed into push-notification territory, the kind usually reserved for breaking national emergencies.

At what point does legitimate scrutiny become a pile-on? When does informing the public tip into feeding a spectacle?

Jason Arday wasn’t just a headline or a scandal. He was a 41-year-old man - a father, a partner, a son, a brother. And tonight, his family is grieving him.

We do not know the cause of his death, and it would be completely wrong to suggest media coverage caused it. But there are questions to answer. I also think the academic world must answer these too.
But we can still ask uncomfortable questions about how we treat people once they become the story. Because haven’t we been here before?

After Caroline Flack died, there was soul-searching. We talked about pile-ons and the human cost of relentless scrutiny. ‘Be Kind’ was everywhere. We said we’d learned. And yet here we are again.

I used to be a tabloid journalist. I’ve been part of that machine and seen how it works from the inside. I’ve come to realise how easily “public interest” gets blurred with public appetite, clicks, and momentum.

I’m still a journalist, thankfully no longer in the tabloids. But I still believe in journalism. I still believe in holding people and institutions to account. Sometimes that means publishing things people don’t want published, asking difficult questions, exposing wrongdoing.

But public interest is not the same as public appetite. There has to be proportionality. There has to be humanity. Accountability should never become punishment.

And alleged wrongdoing should never become a licence for millions of people to watch someone’s life unravel in real time.

Whatever the truth ultimately is about Jason Arday’s death, I hope his family is given the privacy, dignity, and space to grieve.

And I hope we don’t do what we always do - talk about kindness for a few days, nod along, promise change… and then forget it all the moment the next name becomes a headline.

Because there is always a human being behind it.

⏩Patricia Devlin is an award winning investigative journalist.

Behind Every Headline

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Sixty Two

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