Dick Spicer, of the Irish Humanist Association. believes that in the secular state all perspectives can be accommodated, he tells Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent
THEY ARE the largest “faith” group in the Republic after Catholics – but few of them seem to be aware of it.
They are, in short, those who ticked the “No Religion” box in the 2006 census form. As many as 186,300 did so, meaning there are more people of no religion in the Republic than there are Church of Ireland members (125,600), Presbyterians (23,500), Orthodox Christians (20,800) and Methodists (12,200) combined.
The census showed there was an increase in the number of such people of 34.6 per cent, or 48,000, on 2002. A further 70,300 people did not state their religion in the 2006 census, bringing the total for those in the Republic with “no religion” and who did not state their religion to 256,600 in 2006.
In Northern Ireland the situation is not dissimilar. In the 1991 census, 59,234 people there stated they had “no religion” – 3.7 per cent of the population. In that same year, 114,827 – 7.3 per cent – did not state their religion. This meant that 174,061, or 11 per cent, of the Northern Irish population described themselves as having “no religion” or did not state their religion.
By the time of the 2001 census in Northern Ireland that figure had increased significantly. The numbers of those with “no religion” and those who did not state their religion stood at 233,853, or 13.88 per cent of the population.
In so far as this disparate group of non-believers, agnostics and atheists in either jurisdiction could be said to have a representative voice, it would be through a humanist organisation.
The closest thing to this is the Irish Humanist Association in the Republic and the Northern Ireland Humanist Association.
Last March, both came together to publish Humanism Ireland magazine, which plans to appear every two months.
One of the founding members and current vice-chairman of the Irish Humanist Association is Dick Spicer. He would not describe himself as an “aggressive secularist”. Rather, he believes that “in the secular state all perspectives can be accommodated”.
He has no problem, for instance, with denominational or multi-denominational schools, but he does believe that where geography disallows choice (e.g. there is just one school in an area), “the school should be persuaded and encouraged towards a more neutral ethos. I don’t mean ethically free. We all share similar ethics. We just differ on what we adhere to – humanists to human thought, logic, emotion; religious believers to the divine”.
But, he continued, “we can share many perspectives. Religious/denominational education is a positive, at the end of the day”. He believes “the secular way of life has become almost the norm in Ireland today’’ and that “increasingly people recognise that the way to accommodate diversity is to have mutual State institutions where people can relate without feeling dominated. This allows each group to hold its own perspective”.
As with representatives of faith groups, he too is deeply concerned with what is happening in urban Ireland. He traces the social breakdown in parts of our cities to poor parenting and in many cases to a breakdown in discipline and self-discipline.
Much of this, he said, originated in “so much Irish reliance on the church for ethics and moral guidance. When that was undermined, people were left with nothing. The baby was thrown out with the bathwater”.
People lived by “rules from above rather than from an ethical perspective [they had worked out themselves]. They were ‘taught’ what was ‘readymade’. People were told to accept. They were not encouraged to think about what was right”, he said.
He criticises the situation whereby “the moral or ethical outlook was dependent on absurdities such as eternal damnation – a system of rewards and punishments”.
Such an outlook “should be based on what is rationally right for the human being, for a good life and civil order, rather than on reward and punishment”.
People now seem less connected to the local community than in the past and, if not connected in that broader sense, they revert to the tribe or gang, as is evident, he says.
He believes that “many working-class estates have been abandoned to criminals’’ by the middle classes and he suggested, as a probably useful social experiment, that members of the legal profession ought to be forced to live in those working-class estates and to share in the wreckage caused by drug-addiction, fear and violence.
“We do need direct social constraint. When that goes, it is a recipe for social disorder,” he says. “People are not always full of the milk of human kindness. I believe the leniency of the legal system has not helped.’’
But there are no easy answers. He himself has two sons and, at a time when the family was living in a difficult area, they joined the Defence Forces. “It made them men,’’ he said.
He also believes that an over-emphasis in our education system on the academic has played its part in alienating disaffected young people. He refers to the German system in which the academic and technical are encouraged side by side and enjoy equal status. This means that young people who are more technically minded have other ways of securing self-respect and esteem.
He is very happy that the Humanist Association of Ireland has been accepted by the Government as a representative body to take part in the Structured Dialogue with Churches, Faith Communities and Non-Confessional Bodies.
The association met Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Ministers Dermot Ahern, Brian Lenihan, Eamon Ryan, Conor Lenihan and Trevor Sargent last October as part of that dialogue. It has been “very helpful”, he says.
The structured dialogue had is origins in the original EU constitution, finalised under the 2004 Irish presidency of the EU, and it has been incorporated into the Lisbon Treaty. To date, Ireland is the only EU country to have set up the dialogue.
Mr Spicer says that “to give Bertie Ahern his due, he was one of the few European leaders whose commitment to such a dialogue was serious. I would like to give him credit for that. He deserves it. I believe he is genuinely religious himself, but he takes other people’s perspectives seriously”.
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