Madam, – The national census will take place on April 10th, and I note from the Central Statistics Office website that the religion question still favours the main organised religions at the expense of the non-religious in an obviously biased way, just as it did in the 2006 census. There must be hundreds of thousands of Irish people who subscribe to no religion, especially after the disclosures of clerical outrages during the past five years, yet the way the question is presented – “What is your religion?” assumes that everyone must have a religion – if not now then sometime in the past – and the option of answering “no religion” doesn’t at first sight appear to exist, so well concealed is it beneath two rows of big boxes, bearing the instruction “write in your religion”.
Anyone with a minuscule knowledge of polls and polling will be familiar with the ease of distorting the results to an enormous extent merely by subtly adjusting the way a question is posed.
And there is good reason to be suspicious of the motives because enormous sums of taxpayers’ money will be spent according to the perceived religious needs of the community. The continued subsidy of religious schools and hospitals, the distribution of foreign aid through religious organisations, and the reluctance to ask the clerics to pay a realistic share of the cost of the paedophile scandal, for example, would all be affected if the census eventually showed that only a few people actually subscribe to an organised religion and obey its dogma (belief in God is an entirely different matter). – Yours, etc,