Civic engagement which takes account of religious and non-religious stakeholders is essential to the public interest and to building a trusted democracy, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Michael Jackson, said in his Easter sermon.

The Archbishop said an impression is given that “religious belonging should have taken itself off long ago in order to leave the adults to get on with the real work”. He suggested a Citizens’ Assembly for people of faith and politics to discuss the future of the public interest. “It would be an engagement quite different from the other matters discussed by the Citizens’ Assembly. But it could lead us right into two things that currently are at loggerheads in Ireland and neither of them is going away anywhere soon: secular policy and religious belonging,” he stated.

He added that a totally secular state – as reflected in policy and politics – does not seem to accord with the active spiritual and religious sense in the majority of Irish people. Neither would it reflect the many people who have come from outside Ireland have brought a culture and faith that is their identity. “It would be a consummate irony were an Ireland that pushes relentlessly a secular agenda in a post–secular world wilfully to shut its ears to the very diversity that is staring it in the face through its own residents and citizens simply and precisely because such diversity wears a religious smile,” he said.