A talk by Professor Tom Gallagher

Where: Davenport hotel, Dublin 2

When: 8pm, Thursday, May 15

In Ireland there is a concerted move to banish religion from the public square. In Scotland, something very similar is taking place and if anything is further advanced than here.

Professor Tom Gallagher, will who give our next talk, describes Scotland as a “single ideology State”. He says that anti-Catholicism in his country is now being replaced by a more generalised anti-religious feeling.

As he wrote recently in The Irish Catholic: “A new humanist establishment insists that Scotland cannot complete its journey to modernity unless religion is banned to a firmly private sphere”.

He sees the same process at work in Ireland and says, “Irish despondency about the possibility that militant secularists will impose a harmful set of values in society thanks to their increasing dominance in institutions of State and popular culture is very real”.

In both Scotland and Ireland, he argues, the Church needs to be aware that it has “the fight of its life on its hand in preventing a complete takeover of national life” by what amounts to a “civic atheism”.

Tom Gallagher is emeritus professor of politics at the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University. He is author most recently of ‘Divided Scotland’ a history of ethnic conflict in Scotland down to the present aggressive secularism taking root in Scottish society.

If you would like to attend please email [email protected] or phone 01 6619 204.

Tea and coffee will be served afterwards as usual.

ENDS