Religion is still “ a fundamental part of the identity of very many Irish people”, a senior Fianna Fáil politician has said.

In a statement yesterday, Martin Mansergh, Minister of State at Finance, OPW and the Arts, said: “Complete secularisation of Irish society is sought by only a small minority, who have a tendency to invoke human rights in the absence of any substantial democratic support.”

Mr Mansergh, who is the Fianna Fáil candidate for Tipperary South, said that, in a time of national crisis, people often felt a need “to draw on their own inner resources, and reaffirm their fundamental values and sense of identity”.

He noted that, in relation to the current education debate, in over eight and a half years in the Oireachtas, he had “no requests from within the Tipperary South constituency to end the system of denominational education, which is as important to minorities as it is to the great majority”.

He added that he had never had any requests from voters to legislate for abortion on the lines of the ‘X’ case.

Making suicidal intent, real or alleged, the basis of any abortion law would be fundamentally flawed, he continued.

“This issue is and should be reserved to the Irish people, as was established in the 1983 Pro-Life Amendment, in the consultation on which I had some role as Taoiseach’s advisor,” Mr Mansergh said.

He said that it was very important that the dialogue between the State and the Churches initiated by Bertie Ahern should be maintained.

“Church and State have separate roles and responsibilities, but also, as in health and education, overlapping ones,” he said.

In the run up to the last General Election, Mr Mansergh made similar statements about the importance of religious freedom.

In March 2007, then-Senator Mansergh said that elites who wanted to “reshape Irish society according to their lights with least possible reference to the people” were fundamentally threatening religious freedom in Ireland .
 
In an article in the Irish Catholic, Senator Mansergh said that such people are demanding that their unrepresentative views “supplant the democratic wishes of a majority of the people”. Secular humanism, he continued “is being promoted as the embodiment of neutrality and therefore should rightfully become the norm at a stroke,” he said.

He added that the majority faith of Catholicism “places few constraints on personal freedom or choices, but equally no person or organisation should be forced by legislation or agencies of the State to act in a manner contrary to their conscientious religious beliefs”. Influential voices were attempting to undermine this equilibrium, he said.

He also referred to calls for a removal of derogations from the EU equality directive which allow churches to protect their ethos in schools, hospitals and charities. Without the derogation, it would have been “impossible to maintain a religious ethos in any institution,” he said. “In short, religion is to be privatised and removed from the public sphere in a . . . post-Christian Ireland.”