Earlier this year, Labour Senator Ivana Bacik
and her colleague in the Dáil, Labour TD Aodhan O Riordán proposed ending the
prayers said in the Oireachtas before each session, supposedly to promote
greater “pluralism”.

Both Senator Bacik and Mr O’Riordán placed
this issue on the agenda of the Committee on Procedure and Privileges (CPP) in
both Houses of the Oireachtas. She said that she made the call “in the context
of a debate on the Church and the State”.

Various local county councils here have seen
similar moves. So far, none of these moves has come to anything. But the
suggestion that any display of religiosity in a political setting is, ipso
facto, anti-pluralist is gaining traction.

But in the UK, moves by secularists to ban
prayers at local council meetings have come under attack from some unexpected
quarters.

Michael White, assistant editor at the
Guardian, usually a noted bastion of secularism, has blasted the National
Secular Society (NSS) for taking Bideford Town Council to the High Court in an
attempt to end their practice of saying prayers at the start of its meetings.

Commenting on the case Mr White, an assistant
editor at The Guardian, warned that the case raised a wider question “about the
intolerant impulse many people have to inflict their views on others”.

He said that “communities should surely be
allowed to sort out their own arrangements” without interference from the NSS.

A Labour MP has also questioned why the case
had even gone to court.

Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda said “surely the
16 members of Bideford Council, who have already voted on this twice, should be
allowed to pray, if they want to.

“And any member who doesn’t want to pray
should be free not to do so. Why it all has to go to the High Court I don’t know.”

Former councillor Clive Bone says that he was
“disadvantaged and embarrassed” when Christian prayers were said in the council
chamber. Mr Bone’s case is being backed by the NSS.

Ireland may well be growing more secular by
the day, but one would still have thought that Britain is streets ahead of us
in that regard.

But perhaps not. After all, if a leading
writer for one of its leading secular papers, the Guardian, and a Labour MP
both think that banning prayers for local councils is going too far, it
suggests that at least some British secularists are more pluralist than their
Irish equivalents.