Archbishop Diarmuid Martin (pictured) has urged the newly-elected Taoiseach Enda Kenny to reinstate the formal dialogue between Church and State on faith and social issues.

Speaking to The Irish Independent, Archbishop Martin said it would be “a good idea” for Mr Kenny to call a meeting of the Government’s forum with Christian, Jewish and Islamic leaders as well as humanists.

The forum was set up by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern in 2007 as part of the Lisbon Treaty as an official channel for Church leaders to express their views on a range of issues.

The last time the forum met was in April 2008.

Archbishop Martin said the forum had not met during the three years in office of outgoing Taoiseach Brian Cowen because “of the very difficult period in the economic life of the country”.

At the time Mr Ahern was congratulated by Cardinal Sean Brady for being the first head of government in Europe to establish an official body for talks between politicians and religious leaders.

Archbishop Martin was speaking before the start of a multi-denominational service of prayer for the 31st Dail, held in St Ann’s Church of Ireland.

Church leaders last night noted how in his first speech as Taoiseach, Mr Kenny said that the challenges facing the Fine Gael-Labour Government were not just financial, but also included a spiritual dimension.

On leaving office, Mr Ahern spoke of his frustration at a growing hesitation to refer to issues of faith and belief in public debate. At a reception for churches and faith communities involved in the structured dialogue, he said this hesitation “upsets me and irritates me”.

Mr Ahern said he had observed “a growing hesitation in public debate to refer to religion, the churches, issues of faith and belief, and sometimes even to acknowledge the very fact of the impact on our culture and institutions of the historical contribution of the church communities”.

He acknowledged that this partly reflected the increasing percentage of people in Ireland who did not profess a religious faith or were less likely to practise.

However, he insisted that another, more worrying trend, was also at work, “the attempt to exclude matters of faith and religious belief from public debate and confine them to the purely personal, with no social or public significance”. He recalled that “on a previous occasion [at the launch of the Structured Dialogue in February 2007] I referred to this as ‘aggressive secularism’.”

He continued: “It is, I believe, fundamentally illiberal and anti-democratic to silence opinions and views, and marginalise institutions and communities which draw their identity and ethical positions from a background of religious belief.” This was his “deepest held conviction in many of the things I said while in this office and before I held this office”.

Saying so, he was “acutely conscious of the large and growing number of our citizens who do not subscribe to any religious belief . . . We must be acutely aware of how our democracy provides an inclusive and respectful approach to all our citizens, from whatever religious of philosophical perspective they come.”

However, he went on, “from the perspective of Irish republicanism, I believe that the political challenge is to build a society which has the allegiance of ‘Catholic, Protestant and dissenter’, and free-thinkers as well”.