The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Dr John Neill, has said the education system must continue to have a place for religion.

In an address yesterday at Trinity College Dublin, he said that the human spirit was “impoverished if its spiritual and indeed religious dimension is ignored”.

Referring to the history of Trinity College, he said that its experience was surely “that the religious and the secular must interact; that a mutual respect can be established and that a proper humility can be observed by all in the realisation that truth is greater than any of us can conceive.”

He suggested that the link between faith and learning “may in the past sometimes have been expressed by the attempt of institutional religion to control and limit access to truth, and to define the indefinable”.

But he added that religion was “a part of Truth, and truth is impoverished without this vital aspect”.

Archbishop Neill also acknowledged that the debate about the role of religion in education “was very much alive in Irish society today” and said that arguments were being formed “that would remove all issues of, and traditions of, faith from the educational system”.

“New ways may well have to be found at the Primary and Secondary level in education to express a place for the faith dimension, without the aspects of ownership and limited control that have been inherited from the particular history of Irish education,” the Archbishop said.

He said that Christian apologists in the past had “tried to ‘batten down the hatches’, and to deny and even silence the advances of science”.

However, he added that “the secular agenda has been equally limited, denying a role for faith and religious expression as being worthy of consideration”.

But he said that between the secular and the religious “a mutual respect can be established and that a proper humility can be observed by all in the realisation that truth is greater than any of us can conceive”.