Newsline 9 June 2017

Newsline 9 June 2017

Since the last Newsline the country has endured another terror attack, showing once more the urgent need for our entire society to actively confront and defeat Islamist extremism and the ideology that underpins it.

Meanwhile, the General Election has produced an unclear and fractured result. Whatever the precise composition of the next government, and however long it lasts for, we will be standing up for secularism and human rights.

Read our blog on the fallout from the election below, and show us your support today.

News, Blogs & Opinion

What happens next? Some thoughts on the election and the challenges to come

Opinion | Fri, 9th Jun 2017

The dust is beginning to settle. Whether you're delighted, dismayed or just surprised by last night's results there are challenges and opportunities to come.

Whatever your party political views, there are principles that we can all support: the triumph of secular democracy, a commitment to human rights and tolerance, and the rolling back of theocracy, religious privilege and sectarianism. But the success of these values is not guaranteed. Around the world, including here in the UK, these ideas are under attack, and need secular democrats of all stripes to stand up for them.

Democracy isn't just about polling day. The days ahead are as an important as the campaign itself. As the new government programme becomes clear we will be there to demand equal respect for everyone's human rights so that no one is either advantaged or disadvantaged because of their religious background or beliefs.

The short election and focus on other issues meant that secularist concerns were always going to be low down the agenda. But with your help we'll continue to raise these important issues with MPs – including our honorary associates in the House of Commons, who have all been successfully re-elected.

The NSS is a non-partisan organisation; whoever governs we will hold them to account on the issues that matter to our members and supporters. We will continue to lobby all parties to adopt secular reforms which will make society, our education system, and the law fairer for all.

Bleary-eyed, the NSS staff are at their desks today ready for another day's campaigning – and assisting parents and staff dealing with unwanted religious intrusion in their schools.

No government has yet grappled with the vast social changes our country has seen in the last sixty years: the collapse in the established Church, the unprecedented explosion of diversity of and in religions, the significant rise of the non-religious demographic, new forms of pluralism and new sectarian conflicts. These all demonstrate the urgent need to end religious privilege and rethink religion's public role.

With Theresa May – and her chief of staff Nick Timothy's – reputation taking a huge hit, it's not clear how committed the Government will be to their plans to open more divisive and discriminatory faith schools, including a new wave of 100% religiously selective academies. If the Government can't get their grammar school proposals through then the free-school proposals – despite not needing Parliamentary approval – may also stall. We certainly hope so. We also have a religious education system, including a requirement for compulsory worship, that was designed in the forties. These need to be reviewed and we'll be campaigning to ensure they are.

Progressive developments such as the advancement of equality and human rights have met a backlash with a false but widespread narrative that these have undermined religious freedom. The DUP, who Theresa May could now rely upon to a run a minority government, have long argued for increased religious exemptions to equality legislation – principally to allow religious businesses to discriminate against LGBT customers – and have been instrumental in blocking marriage equality and abortion reform in Northern Ireland. A rich vein of creationism runs through the party. What influence these ideas have will have to be seen.

It certainly looks like we'll be living in interesting times.

We need to defend both our lives and our way of life

Opinion | Thu, 8th Jun 2017

Terrorist atrocities have a way of bringing the nation together, albeit temporarily. We need a glue to keep us together, to protect our lives and our way of life, writes Stephen Evans.

There's a lot to be said for Britain's calm, defiant response to the threat of terror. Immediately after the 7/7 bombings in 2005, Londoners clambered aboard the city's buses and underground trains, posting 'We Are Not Afraid' messages on social media. One of the first images I saw following the latest attack was of a man fleeing London Bridge, but being careful not to spill his pint.

But as each terrorist atrocity apparently strengthens our resolve, it also risks numbing us to terrorist outrage. One thing we can't afford to do is regard terrorist attacks as the "new normal" - however depressingly familiar they become.

With the prospect of jihadis returning to Europe after fighting alongside ISIS in Syria or Iraq, the UK's independent reviewer of terrorism legislation has suggested that "Britain is facing a level of threat from Islamic State militants not seen since the IRA bombings of the 1970s".

I grew up in an era of IRA-related terrorism, when news of murderous and bloody attacks seemed as grimly familiar as they do today. But the threat we currently face, motivated by an Islamic extremist ideology, is of a different magnitude, and unlikely to be resolved by a 'peace process' anytime soon. There is no silver bullet.

However well intentioned, the usual platitudes about these acts of violence having 'nothing to do with Islam' must be resisted. They clearly have something to do with Islam and it's wholly counterproductive when politicians and other commentators pretend otherwise.

An evil ideology that uses scripture to glorify martyrdom and promise salvation through suicide attacks clearly has a noxious influence on the minds of the gullible and pathetic individuals who are driven to murder innocent people in the name of Allah. The vast majority of Muslims will reject this interpretation of Islam, but it is nevertheless an interpretation of Islam being espoused in modern Britain by British Muslims, and we need to recognise that.

Inevitably, after any Jihadist attack, there are those that seek to demonise all Muslims. Anti-Muslim bigotry is an utterly mindless response to terrorism. Ordinary Muslims are as much victims of Islamic violence and depravity as anyone else. If the terrorists divide us they win and we lose. But in the wake of the latest spate of attacks we need unity, but also unflinching honesty in confronting the problem before us.

The threat we face in Britain, and across Europe, is not just to our physical lives, but also to our way of life. A pernicious mindset that regards religion as the source from which all authority is derived is perhaps a greater threat to our liberal democracy than terrorism will ever be. Governments and civil society must also therefore challenge the theocratic worldview that underpins Islamic terrorism.

An ugly ideology that condones arbitrary violence, the subjugation of women and the supremacy of God's law over secular law is not is not compatible with the British way of life, and people of all faiths and none must unite in rejecting it.

But these views must be challenged, not censored. Anti-terror laws that suppress free speech will only undermine civil liberties and fundamental human rights. Whilst there is a relationship between extremist views and terrorism, they are two different things and policy makers need to be careful about confusing them. Knee-jerk responses to terror attacks born out of a 'something must be done' mentality are unlikely to make us safer.

What should be welcomed, however, is Theresa May's pledge to break down segregated communities. Unfortunately, her words ring hollow in the face of her regressive plan to abolish the 50% cap on faith-based admissions, paving the way for a new wave of religious schools.

Unprecedented levels of migration and our drift away from Christianity means Britain today is characterised by a diversity of creeds and cultures like never before. As long ago as 2011, the former Prime minister David Cameron admitted that the doctrine of state multiculturalism had failed, pointing out that "for too long different cultures have been encouraged to live separate lives".

Schools are the best chance we have to break down barriers, but this golden opportunity is being squandered by successive Government's dogged attachment to faith-based education. Any strategy to better integrate Britain's diverse population must include a commitment to phase out faith schools. Britain's youngsters should be educated together, not divided by religion and ethnicity. And whether it be found in the state, independent or burgeoning 'illegal' sector, religious indoctrination and exposure of children to Islamist ideology in schools should be considered an abuse of child rights.

A bleary-eyed nostalgia for Britain's Christian past must no longer stand in the way of us carving out modern secular identity, robust enough to see off the Islamist threat.

Terrorist atrocities have a way of bringing the nation together, albeit temporarily. We need a glue to keep us together. Political leaders and civil society must work together in building a more assertive culture that robustly, actively and unashamedly promotes democratic values such as the separation of religion and state, the rule of law, human rights and equal treatment. In that way, secularism can protect us all.

This article was originally published by Huffington Post

Catholic Church backs down on ‘faith certificates’ for pupils

News | Thu, 8th Jun 2017

The Catholic Church has dropped plans to take the Government to court in order to give priests the right to arbitrarily determine whether pupils are eligible for a school place on the basis of faith.

In 2016 the Office of the Schools Adjudicator upheld several complaints about the 'Certificates of Catholic Practice' and said schools had "failed" to comply with the admissions code.

Schools Week reports that the Church has now backed down over a threat to challenge the Government with a judicial review.

The certificate, which would be signed by a priest, testifies: "I hereby certify that this child and his/her family are known to me and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the child is from a practising Catholic family."

But Schools Adjudicator Dr Bryan Slater ruled that the certificate did not meet the requirement to be "reasonable, clear, objective, procedurally fair, and comply with all relevant legislation".

The certificates were "the gift of an applicant's parish priest", he said, and were opaque to parents because even meeting the standard of a 'practising Catholic' in church attendance would not guarantee receipt of a certificate. This would create unfairness.

The Church has now said a certificate will be issued if a parent has attended mass for a minimum of five years.

A certificate can be signed for parents who do not meet this threshold in "exceptional circumstances".

Professor Anna Vinoles of Cambridge University told Schools Week that no new definition would make the schools "more socially inclusive."

Stephen Evans, campaigns director of the National Secular Society, welcomed the Church's decision to drop the threat of court action, but said, "No discrimination against pupils on the basis of their religious background should be considered fair.

"To determine whether children can attend their local state-funded school on the basis of their parent's churchgoing activity is discriminatory and plain wrong. The next government should remove the rights of faith schools to have admissions policies that prioritise pupils on the basis of baptism, religious affiliation or the religious activities of their parents."

'Community leaders' represent no-one but themselves, says Nazir Afzal

News | Wed, 7th Jun 2017

Former Chief Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal has said that the authorities are "lazy" in reaching minority groups, and still rely on self-appointed 'community leaders'.

Mr Afzal recently resigned his position as chief executive of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners so that he would be free to speak out in the media following the Manchester bombing. He said he had a duty to speak out about Islamist extremism.

He told The Times, "There's no way that me speaking about deradicalisation and protecting all our communities could be seen as conflicting with what the [Police and Crime Commissioners] would want to say. I should have been able to talk about these things without having to leave my job."

Since then he has been vocal in challenging the authorities to do more to combat extremism. He accused the Muslim Council of Britain and other Muslim groups of spreading "myths" about Prevent and said there was an "industry which is trying to undermine Prevent."

He said the much-maligned strategy "is simply safeguarding" and had done "phenomenally good work."

He said that it had stopped 50 children and 100 others from going to Syria, but that its work was being "constantly undermined".

Mr Afzal condemned "self-appointed" community leaders whose sole agenda was to present Muslims "as victims".

"I've spent 25 years meeting so-called community leaders who represent no one but themselves," he said.

He also called for more funding for women's groups, pointing out that "women, particularly in the Muslim community, are already engaged with the families, they're identifying people at risk. But they're doing it on a shoe string."

The former Chief Crown Prosecutor also questioned the need for new laws to combat terrorism. "I think we've had 11 bits of legislation on terrorism since 2000; counter terrorism act, prevention of terrorism act, I think we're running out of names for them", he said.

During his career Mr Azfal has worked on combating 'honour'-based violence, forced marriage, FGM, and played a critical role in prosecuting a predominantly Pakistani grooming gang, which was recently depicted in the BBC's Three Girls drama.

Meanwhile, the director of the counter-extremism organisation Inspire, Sara Khan, has criticised "naïve politicians" for their "singular myopic lens" about the Muslim community.

She accused them of being "so eager to stand up against anti-Muslim hatred they end up legitimising the very people who provide the climate for extremism, and attack progressive Muslims who seek to counter Islamist extremism."

Irish National Maternity Hospital: “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!”

Opinion | Mon, 5th Jun 2017

The determination to give a hospital to a disgraced religious order, in spite of public outrage, is the very antithesis of secularism. But the episode has prompted calls for fundamental changes in the relationship between church and state, writes Keith Porteous Wood.

"Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!" – that was the evocative placard slogan seen when thousands of protesters marched through Dublin in September calling for a referendum to widen access to terminations. At present abortion is all-but prohibited in Ireland.

The placards may have to come out again soon as the controversy over the National Maternity Hospital (St Vincent's) rumbles on.

The state gifted the hospital, which had been built with public funds, to the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity who owned the land on which it was built. Not only was the taxpayer picking up the tab for building the hospital, they would also be paying the running costs, too. In spite of this, the Church insists that under its ownership the hospital would have to be run with a 'Catholic ethos'.

According to The Times the chair of the Hospital Group that includes St Vincent's told the secretary-general of the Department of Health that canon law obliged a hospital on Catholic land (as this is) to operate by Catholic rules. As reported by the Sunday Times, Bishop of Elphin Kevin Doran, referring to the Church being "owners of the hospital", asserted that "Public funding … does not change that responsibility [to follow Catholic doctrine]."

And of all hospitals, a national maternity hospital is where that ethos would have the greatest adverse impact. The then-master of the National Maternity Hospital, Dr Peter Boylan, clearly accepts this fairly obvious, unpalatable, point. He told RTE Radio 1's Morning Ireland show that "if IVF, sterilisation, abortion, and gender reassignment were to be carried out at the new National Maternity Hospital, it would be the only hospital in the world owned and run by a Catholic order to allow such procedures." He accuses the hospital board of being "deaf to the concerns of the public it serves."

Dr Bolan was told that his responsibility was to the board and not the citizens of Ireland – the women who will use this facility. Nobly, he resigned his post. And he was not the only top medic to do so.

It is chilling that those accepting these resignations over key principles clearly thought it worth losing such invaluable people to maintain that ethos.

The chairperson of the Association for the Improvement of Maternity Services is squarely on the dissenters' side: "The women of Ireland, the childbearing women of Ireland, they absolutely do not want to find that their bodies are being controlled by religious ethos - or by anybody. They want autonomy over their own bodies and at the moment that is 100 percent not guaranteed."

And there has been a magnificent fight back. In just a few weeks a petition to block the Sisters of Charity as 'sole owners' of National Maternity Hospital attracted over 100,000 signatures, many times more than expected. Even the Sisters of Charity, no strangers to being attacked, couldn't hold out against that. They announced that they "will end our involvement in St Vincent's Healthcare Group and will not be involved in the ownership or management of the new National Maternity Hospital. No cogent reason is given but some pages on we find the curious passage "in the best interests of the patients and children born in the National Maternity Hospital today that they be provided with modern maternity and neonatal services that are women and infant centred". Surely not an admission that women and infant centred services are in the best interests of the patients and children, but that the Sisters cannot deliver this?

And just a word or two about the so-called Sisters of Charity. According to the My Uplift petition site: "The Sisters of Charity is one of 18 residential institutions that is highlighted by the Ryan report 2009 to have been responsible for child abuse. They still owe €3 million to the redress scheme for its survivors. The Sisters of Charity, along with three other religious congregations, were responsible for the management of Magdalene Laundries. In 2013 they stated they would not be making ANY [their emphasis] contributions to the State redress scheme to the women who had been subject [of] abuse in the Magdalene Laundries."

Understandably, the petition website section on the hospital campaign is now emblazoned with the word "Victory!" But it is almost certainly premature to start hanging out the bunting. While their demand to "prevent the Sisters of Charity becoming 'sole owners' of the hospital" was a well-focused first objective, they now need to go very much further. Next should be, I urge, to remove ownership and control to a secular, preferably democratically-accountable, body beyond religious influence. Instead, the hospital is to be transferred to a charity and – most sinister of all as the Irish Times concludes – "the ultimate ownership of the company, has not been spelled out". We have no guarantee that the owners of the company will not be religiously motivated. I urge campaigners, keep your eye on the ball and don't give up until St Vincent's is under secular control.

I would not be the least surprised if the transfer of ownership by the Sisters of Charity is just a tactical withdrawal until the dust settles. One attempt to speed up that settling may be seen from Bishop Doran. His assertion to the Sunday Times that public funding makes no difference now seems politically inconvenient, even embarrassing. He now claims to the Irish Times that he spoke "in general terms" as the proposed site of the National Maternity Hospital is not in his diocese, and that he did not specifically mention the National Maternity Hospital.

And could the Sisters also be rewriting history? It stretches credibility to claim after having recently accepted in principle the gift of the hospital, that "for the last two years we have been actively working to find the best way to relinquish our shareholding of the St Vincent's Healthcare Group (SVHG)".

And the word "relinquish" has been cleverly chosen – not for the first time – for its imprecision. One headline read "Government may ask Sisters of Charity to gift land to State", but let's not hold our breath; we know from bitter experience how money and assets tend very much more to flow from the state to the Church than the other way around.

Readers will sympathise with the CEO of children's charity Barnardos, Fergus Finlay: "I didn't think we would ever have a row again about the state consciously, deliberately deciding to build a maternity hospital, and giving it to the Catholic Church. I just cannot understand … the logic behind the decision. You wouldn't build a university and hand it over to the Catholic Church. It's inexplicable." But Mr Finlay is much too charitable and I don't think it is inexplicable at all.

The Church's little helpers are well ensconced in every place of power and influence. And they can get quite stroppy if they don't get their way. Even the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Brendan Carr, who was one of the few dissenting voices on the board of the National Maternity Hospital, was treated with contempt and described as "intimidatory and bullying" the treatment meted out to those of dissenting views.

Let's not forget that when the compensation fund for victims of the Church's many abuses (which ran into billions of euros) was being negotiated a few years ago, two canny nuns who were sent to make a deal with the Government. They managed, with the help of an accommodating government Minister, to cap their contribution at €128 million, saving the Church hundreds of millions of euros that will now be borne by the taxpayer.

One of the comments in The Journal story particularly caught my eye: "Unfortunately there are 'visible', and 'not so visible' religious 'orders'. Opus Dei, for example, are like a virus throughout Irish society, and are in politics, as well as being heavily involved in many schools, colleges and universities. Yes, our young people, to this day, are still being groomed by them. The very real possibility is that we (have or) will have a minister for health that is a member of Opus Dei and, as they are secretive about their membership, none of us will know." The commenter then asks whether there should be disclosure by members of government and the judiciary. It took many questions and a long time for Ruth Kelly who held several ministerial appointments under Tony Blair (who hid his Catholicism while PM) to admit, the first Minister to do so, that she was a full member of Opus Dei.

Such is the de facto absence of secularism that a couple of weeks ago it would hardly have seemed realistic to ask for what is so badly needed: a high level independent inquiry into what lay behind the proposal to gift the hospital, and consider the much wider implications about the Catholic-dominated publicly funded healthcare around the country.

An example of where such an inquiry might have been appropriate is when complaints are upheld by the United Nations Committee against Torture, as was the case over the (Catholic) Magdalene Laundries - forced labour camps mostly run by the RC Church in Ireland until as late as 1996 - and the demands for investigation and reparations are quietly sidestepped by the Government.

Most disturbing and telling of all is the contribution by the minister for health, Simon Harris, who has insisted that Catholic ownership of the hospital will not influence the care it provides.

So far, every move to separate Church and State in Ireland, such as the outgoing Taoiseach's (Prime Minister's) attack on the Vatican, have sadly turned out to be false dawns. But maybe the tide is – at long last – turning. The St Vincent's saga has been described as "10 days that shook the nation". Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin, hugely disappointed at Dr Boylan's resignation, showed impressive vision: "The controversy over the NMH that has ignited will start that debate. … we have to migrate to a different world. … [S]tate-funded institutions that are 100% funded by the taxpayer, that are staffed by people who are 100% paid by taxpayer should be owned and controlled by the taxpayer."

I also take my hat off to Kate O'Connell, the Fine Gael TD (MP) for Dublin Bay South where the hospital is located. She said "this should be the start of a process in which the state divorces itself from the church". Maybe she can enlist the assistance of her newly-elected Taoiseach, Ireland's first openly gay Prime Minister.