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AT A hearing of the Dáil subcommittee on human rights yesterday Senator David Norris said: “Everyone has the right to be an apostate, to change your faith. If convinced, there is a moral imperative to do so.” He felt it was a weakness of Islam that it tried to force people to pretend to believe in something they didn’t.

The subcommittee had been presented with a submission from representatives of the Baha’i community in Ireland on the persecution of their co-religionists in Iran. Senator Norris remembered “the awful consternation” in Ireland “when anyone turned”. It was, he said “the Irish version of apostasy. It was nasty. Why shouldn’t people turn? I fully deprecate any system which claims ‘to know’ – the Grand Ayatollah, my fella the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope. They don’t know. It is wrong [for them to claim so] and leads to unpleasant consequences.”