Madam, - Like my friend Michael Nuttall (April 12th) I too have had experience of the difficulty of teaching Protestant pupils in secondary schools.
But I think it is a misunderstanding of the nature of religious education to say that it should be excluded from the curriculum.
All the churches collude in treating religious education as instruction in the ways of particular denominations. Yet it is a subject in its own right and the secondary curriculum would be much poorer without it. Let's have genuine religious education properly taught and followed by all pupils together.
Muslims and Hindus should be welcome to join in but I suspect that they won't want to: to them religious education has no meaning; instead they wish their children to be indoctrinated in the worship of a cult. - Yours, etc,
ROBERT MacCARTHY, Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin 8.