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Kate Yo ✍Tuesday 28/9/26: listening to the news the Garvaghy Rd spokesman that he had met with the Secretary of State and that it was constructive and friendly. Later that evening at after 10.5 the Spokesperson took to the megaphone to update the people on Garvaghy. This is the gist of what he said taken from the video made by the 1916 Societies.

The mediator was to be someone from outside Britain and Ireland someone with experience, perhaps the one used before from South Africa. An independent mediator. The British came back and wanted to bring ourselves the Orange Order and the British together to decide on the mediator. We responded this evening to say that's not how mediation works. Those involved in a dispute don't appoint a mediator. Look at it this way, the British pick one, the Orange Order pick one, and we pick one. That's not the way to do it. The British government should go out and recruit a mediator without the help of ourselves, or the Orange Order. Someone with no connection to here, outside Britain and Ireland and therefore completely independent, and independent in any decision they reach.

I reckon what the British are trying to do is line this up that we are going to be seen as the unreasonable ones, because I'm sure there's been more discussion between the British and the Orange Order than there has been with us. So over the next couple of days there'll be more exchanges between us and the government. But I bet that the British government already has its game plan in place. It's to make us be the unreasonable ones and to make the Orange Order look good. And it goes beyond Garvaghy Road because the Brit's know that the political process is already in crisis and that they need to be seen to give something to Unionism. For the DUP, UU, and TUV, and are using the process to make us the sacrificial lamb.

They are also doing this so that anything that happens on Sunday will be seen to be our fault. Now the British might think they are being smart but us telling youse the night will ensure that the move that the Brits are trying to make, at least youse will see it and understand it. It will not come as a shock. So the next couple of days we are going to have to try everything to try and avoid the Brits and their latest ploy. But I think that they have already decided on their game plan, just like Mo Mowlam did away back in the 90's. They've got their game plan and they are working out how to deliver that game plan and it's looking like Orange feet on Garvaghy Road. It's not the end of it because Orange feet on this road is not acceptable to this community. It will also not be acceptable to nationalist communities right across the north.

If the British government want to go down that road of wrecking the peace process let it be on their head. Because they already know what the result of a march on Garvaghy Road will be: people in Derry, Belfast, South Armagh and Dungiven. What they are trying to do is that the blame falls on us. I also believe that no announcement will be made until Saturday. And there is a reason for that, because you know yourself that there's damn all on TV except sport. The news programmes as you know are five minutes of news and a half hour of sport. Newspapers that are printed for Sunday go to print on Saturday afternoon. So once they make their decision and release it publicly the newspapers will have already been printed and the TVv will not be able to carry much about it. They have the whole thing timed out to a T.

Our defence here will be the support and the reaction of the six counties and probably beyond. As long as we stand united, as long as people are prepared to make this stand the Brits still have a big problem. One thing they will not be able to do is prevent what before here because this time round we know what to expect. We know there will be a battle, and the British know this time we learned lessons from the past, from almost 30 years ago. We are determined that this injustice will not go unopposed. So there's still a couple of days left to convince them.

This afternoon I was also speaking to two people from the Irish government and was telling them about our fears. All the nationalist political parties are behind us in this. As I say there's major repercussions for the British government if they go ahead with what appears to be their strategy. I am hoping that the Dublin government and the nationalist political parties here will make it known to the British government and the Secretary of State. that either this is a proper process or that there'll be major repercussions. Because nationalist parties will pull out of Stormont. But I'm not advocating any of that. That's up to them, to do it because there'll be major repercussions than the British realise.

I know it's not a good note, it doesn't sound good but believe me over the next number of days we are going to convince the British government that this is not about politics but this is about justice for this community and we have no intention of going back.

⏩Kate Yo is a Belfast book lover.

Mediation Policy Exposed 🪶No Going Back

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Seven

 

A Morning Thought @ 3278

Packy Carty ✒ Whenever the mathematical reality of the Northern States demographic momentum and material inversion is laid bare, establishment commentators retreat to a single, comforting sanctuary: 

the growth of the Alliance Party. "People are moving beyond tribalism," the refrain goes. "The middle ground is taking over."

It is a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. The rise of the "neither" designation is not the birth of a new, post-constitutional identity. The party currently occupying that ground is Alliance, but what actually sits underneath it is a class alliance, not a resolved one — sections of the middle classes and the urban petite bourgeoisie on both sides of the sectarian divide, holding together for as long as their shared interests in stability, property, and professional advancement outweigh the pull of their separate national loyalties. It is not a homogeneous bloc waiting to be wooed wholesale by either side.

Start with the party's own voters. The University of Liverpool's 2024 general election survey found 68.1% of people who actually vote Alliance want to remain in the UK, against 31.2% who back Irish unity — on the electorate's face, a party that leans towards the status quo. But look past the voters to the people who've actually joined the party, and the picture changes completely. Research commissioned for the book The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland – Beyond Unionism and Nationalism found 38.1% of Alliance members support Irish unity, 27.6% want to remain in the UK, and 30.1% are undecided. Two surveys of the same party, pointing in different directions, is not evidence of a coherent political philosophy. It's evidence of a coalition of convenience — voters parking a decision they haven't made behind a party that isn't asking them to make it, and a membership already split three ways underneath. This piece isn't claiming that bloc will swing to a united Ireland on polling day. It's pointing out there is no "it" to swing at all — only a community raised, like every other, inside the sectarian structures of the northern state, whose eventual choice will follow the same two forces already at work everywhere else on this island: the community it was reared in, and which outcome actually serves it's material interests better.

Its growth has been built on a coalition of convenience, drawing middle-class professionals and younger voters who have temporarily parked the border question to focus on everyday governance. But when a border poll is triggered, the nature of material self-interest changes instantly. The question ceases to be "who fixes the potholes today?" and becomes "which state guarantees your healthcare, your real wages, your pension, and your children's access to the world's largest single market?" As established, the material balance of that calculation has already inverted toward the South.

The Alliance leadership knows this balance cannot hold. Naomi Long's shift toward suggesting the party might "step back" from a border poll campaign and treat it as a matter of individual conscience, with representatives free to vote as they wish, is a real retreat from her own 2022 position that Alliance would "undoubtedly" take a side eventually — an admission of structural vulnerability, not confident neutrality. Former Alliance leader John Alderdice put it more bluntly still: sitting on the fence is "not politically realistic," he argued, pointing to what he called an "almost inexorable trajectory towards a united Ireland." A party with genuinely no guidance to give on the single largest constitutional question in its country's history isn't rising above the divide. It's postponing the moment it has to pick a side of it.

The structural fault lines are already visible, and they run in both directions at once. When Carole Howard defected to the UUP, the word she reached for was "now" — she said she could "now openly and comfortably express" pro-Union views she evidently hadn't felt free to voice inside Alliance, a defection the party itself called "an act of bad faith." Months earlier, former councillor David Rossiter had walked the other way, resigning from the party in October 2024 because he could "no longer support a party that has not embraced the possibility of a new Ireland." Rossiter didn't just leave quietly. He pointed directly at the same membership poll cited above and accused his own former leadership of sitting on it deliberately, telling the Irish News he assumed the party "took a strategic decision not to engage further in order to protect their unionist leaning voter base" — happy, in his words, to take nationalist votes in swing seats without ever reciprocating by acknowledging what a third of its own members actually wanted. One defector leaving because the party wouldn't let her say she was pro-Union. Another leaving because it wouldn't act on how pro-unity a third of its own membership actually was. That's not a coherent centre. That's a fault line with people falling off both sides of it.

Perhaps the most tragic exposure of this internal contradiction was the experience of Anna Lo. From an Alliance perspective a progressive, pro-European, anti-sectarian figure who ought to have represented their permanent future of "civic" politics in the North, Lo was hounded out of political life by loyalist intimidation after daring to describe a united Ireland as economically logical. Her exit was the canary in the coal mine: it proved that when the constitutional pressure ratchets up, the polite veneer of "neither" vanishes, and the underlying state mechanics reassert themselves.

When the border poll is eventually called, that class alliance comes apart. Alliance will not navigate the referendum as a neutral mediator, nor will it successfully convince its own divided membership to look the other way. The party will splinter along the same fault line running through the rest of the North — its pro-Union wing drifting back to the UUP or DUP to defend the status quo, its progressive and younger cohorts moving toward the material logic already laid out in my second article.

The "middle ground" is not a new political tribe destined to anchor the 1921 settlement forever. It is a cross-sectarian arrangement of convenience among people who share a class position but not a nation, raised the same way as everyone else in this artificial statelet and watching the same clock. Anna Lo's departure was their warning. The actuarial and material numbers already established are what's still ticking. The only remaining question is whether Alliance breaks apart before the referendum begins or during the count.

⏩ Packy Carty is an East Tyrone Socialist Republican. 

The Non-Aligned Of Brigadoon

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin ✍ And then came the cry from the crowd: “SS RUC.”

In a throwback to the mid-1990s, Sinn Féin supporters and others have today, resurrected one of the war cries synonymous with the most turbulent years of the northern conflict.

There is a contradiction here that must not be lost. When Michelle O’Neill returns to work as the First Minister for All, she will do so accompanied by the same PSNI close-protection officers who were being denounced by her party on the Garvaghy Road today. Her protection officers were probably earning a bit of overtime sitting in armoured vehicles nearby while the old “SS RUC” refrain rang out once again.

It wasn’t just the chant that brought me back to the flashpoints of Belfast, the Ormeau Road, the Springfield Road and elsewhere, where I had once rioted with many others against the imposition of Orange marches. The faces on the picket line remained remarkably familiar too. Old, jaded IRA and Sinn Féin men and women who had once fought the RUC on the streets were there again, wider of girth and greyer of hair, but occupying ground, that to the outsider, seemed strangely unchanged. But something fundamental had changed. Their purpose today was to police the peace rather than encourage resistance.

That Michelle and company have been blindsided once again, this time by a loyalist activist, says something about the depth of strategic thinking within the party. A young loyalist previously mocked and dismissed by Sinn Féin has succeeded in making himself the focal point for nationalist and republican anger and blame.

Jamie Bryson is not old enough to remember the Troubles or to have experienced at first hand the violence and disorder unleashed around Drumcree and the other marching flashpoints of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet he has become the pantomime villain to Sinn Féin’s Cinderella: a convenient malevolent character upon whom an altogether more complicated plot can be pinned.

Because the truth is considerably harder to take, particularly for those of us who wanted to give the Good Friday Agreement a fair wind. Jamie Bryson, Stephen Nolan and Carla Lockhart did not invent sectarianism, it has never gone away and that is because the Good Friday Agreement has failed.

It has failed because, primarily, its architecture was designed to end a war rather than to build a peace.
We all assumed back in 98 that the ending of conflict marked the arrival of peace. We were wrong, ending a war is not the same thing as building a peace.

The GFA has not failed because its institutions were inherently incapable of functioning, nor because one community was uniquely responsible for frustrating its promise. It failed because it mandated the continuation of the war by other means, it embedded sectarianism into the fabric of Government and it failed because it gave us the illusion of power sharing without the need to give anything.

The deeper failure has been the spectacular absence of political leadership across the spectrum in the years since 1998. We created institutions incapable of managing our political disagreements and failed to confront the social conditions that continued to reproduce them.

Nearly three decades after the Agreement, sectarianism remains embedded in too much of our political and social life. We have not confronted sectarianism, racism and xenophobia. Culture and identity remain things to be defended against the other rather than shared with them. Human rights have too often become another weapon in the constitutional argument: embraced when useful and disregarded when they protect the rights of those with whom we disagree.

And there is another dynamic to what is happening on the Garvaghy Road today, and it is clear that Breandán Mac Cionnaith is alive to it. The people of the Garvaghy Road, and the Orange march itself, are proxies in a much wider political battle.

Once again, an issue involving rights, culture and competing identities is being drawn almost effortlessly into the old constitutional divide. The language coming from Sinn Féin and the DUP does little to suggest that they see political advantage in lowering the temperature. The institutions, that Sinn Fein signed up to, the police and the parades commission were supposed to provide a means of resolving these disputes, they merely brushed them under the rug.

For Sinn Féin there is an additional political context. Its abysmal record as the largest party in the Executive will inevitably be tested at the next Assembly election. Delivery on what was promised, what was achieved and what was not, should have dictated how people voted. But Garvaghy will change the debate into an election that everyone knows how to fight.

Today marks the beginning of next year's election campaign and indicates that, once again, it will be fought primarily along tribal lines rather than on the delivery of manifesto commitments. Unionism will be told that its culture and rights are under attack. Nationalism will be told that the old Orange state is reasserting itself. Each side will have its villain, its grievance and its call to the tribe.
We did not dismantle the battlefield. We built Stormont on top of it.

⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.

If You Choose The Wrong Path, Then Don’t Complain That You’re Not On The Right One

Pádraic Mac Coitir ✒ Like thousands of other Irish Republicans I was on the Garvaghy Road and as I walked around speaking with people, strangers and many that I know we were under no illusion about what has been happening over the past three days.

Two days were spent in a British colonial court and it came as no surprise that the unionists got their way by getting the go ahead for their sectarian march to walk the road we were on today. 

All the talk by Sinn Féin about a 'shared island' was exposed as nothing more than drivel. When many of us warned about the British government protecting and supporting the unionists we were told they would never be allowed. Stormont is nothing more than a super council that is dominated by unionists and their police force will be there to protect them.
 
Hundreds, if not thousands, of peelers were in Portadown and it reminded a lot of us who took to the streets of Garvaghy Road, Crumlin Road, Ormeau Road and other areas years ago. We were battered off those roads and the usual suspects claimed they would put manners on the peelers and what did we see today? Yes, the very same police force.
 
We were there not to hear mealy mouthed platitudes from Sinn Féin but to support the people of Garvaghy Road. Sinn Féin people had bodyguards on a road where nobody was going to attack them and as they spoke it was about themselves as they look forward to elections next year.
 
As sure as I'm writing this they will call on people to join the same force that harass people and they will batter those trying to stop sectarian bigots walk where they should never be allowed. They'll go back to Stormont and sit with unionist scum that want marches down roads where they should never go. They'll meet British politicians that continue to pump billions of pounds into their armies and police forces while people live in fear of more sectarian marches. The hypocrisy isn't lost on many of us. 

I stand with the people of Garvaghy Road as do thousands of others but I don't support Sinn Féin making political mileage out of a dire situation.

Padraic Mac Coitir is a former republican
prisoner and current political activist.

Shared Island Drivel

Dr John Coulter ✍ Donald Trump has successfully opened a second front against Russian aggression with the historic signing of the new deal with Greenland and Denmark which will see two new major American bases in the Artic region.

This is the most significant deal involving the region since 1951 just as the original Cold War with the old communist Soviet Union was ramping up.

Russian boss Vladimir Putin had himself sparked a second front with the confrontation with Iran and the United States. Russia, in invading Ukraine, has found itself bogged down in Afghanistan Mark Two.

The Ukrainian conflict has become Russia’s Vietnam, and has descended into a war of attrition as casualties mount. Now with Western military aid, the Ukrainians are fighting back, fuelling speculation that a proxy war has developed between Moscow on one side, and Washington on the other - using Ukraine as the battlefield.

Historically, in terms of conventional wars when Russia was invaded, the Russians always deployed a simple tactic - retreat east towards Siberia as fast as possible and let the severe Russian winter do the rest. The French Emperor, German Kaiser and Nazi tyrant Hitler all learned the same bitter lessons over the centuries.

With the end of the Berlin Wall in Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union and fall of communism, NATO tended to sit on its laurels. Putin’s war in Ukraine is really the ex-KGB boss dipping his military toe in the conflict water; how far can be taunt NATO without the situation deteriorating into a full-blown nuclear World War Three?

Given Putin’s self-styled own triple alliance with China and North Korea, Moscow has worked on the assumption that NATO is either too scared or too ill-prepared for anyone seeking a military conflict with Western powers.

Realistically, Putin’s Ukraine strategy fell apart in the first week when the Russians failed to capture three key northern airports during the initial invasion.

This created a major logistical problem for Russia as it meant transporting supplies by road over long distances - ironically, the same scenario which befell the Nazis in the 1940s when they invaded Russia. The more the Soviets retreated east, the longer it took for the Germans to get much-needed supplies to frontline troops.

In Ukraine, the long supply route left the Russians vulnerable to drone attacks by the Ukrainians. How Putin must have yearned for a short, sharp snap campaign to take all of Ukraine; indeed, how frustrated must the Russian leader have been not to have been able to use his ballistic missiles to end the war in a matter of days.

Again, the Russians had to swallow some bitter reality medicine. They couldn’t use the same brutal tactics as they had deployed in the Russian region of Chechnya where allegations of chemical and biological weapons were used.

The Russians certainly could not afford to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine given how NATO may retaliate.

Trump has effectively called Putin’s bluff with the former’s second front in the Artic region which could seriously threaten Russia’s eastern flank.

If Putin thought he had a problem with Western-made drones striking Russia from Ukraine, what about the potential of US drones hitting Russian targets from the Artic?

In spite of the diplomatic decorum for the cameras at the public signing of the Artic deal, there still remains unease within Denmark and Greenland about Trump’s earlier flamboyant language concerning his desires on expanding American interests in the Artic region.

This has to be set in the context of Trump’s astute tactics of ensuring he usually get what he wants. He wanted to get US bases established and expanded in the Artic region before the Chinese or Russians moved in. So it was a case of ‘dial up the hardline rhetoric’, then give the appearance of pulling back - only to get what you wanted in the first place!

The Artic deal also puts additional pressure on the UK to support Trump’s tactics in the Middle East. And, of course, we should take Trump’s comments on supporting Irish unity with a large pinch of political salt. The real aim is to persuade Southern Ireland to abandon its military neutrality and join NATO as a full member.

With only a few years left on his Presidency, Trump wants his military legacy to be a really strong NATO - and United States - capable of combating any moves territorially by the triple alliance of Putin, China and North Korea - the so-called Axis of Evil.

Could this Axis policy be that China has been allocated the task of mainly cyber war; the North Koreans flashing their ballistic weapons testing, and Russia supplying the territorial provocation?

Ironically, Putin must secretly view the Trump Artic deal as the 1960s Cuban missile crisis in reverse!

Just as the old Soviet Union tried to get ballistic missiles located off the American coast in communist Cuba, so too, has Trump been able to secure a deal which will allow the Americans to base substantial weaponry within easy range of Russia’s eastern borders. Where Russia failed in the 1960s, Trump has succeeded in 2026.

If Trump is really smart militarily, it will not be just drones which are located on the two new planned US Artic bases. He should pack both bases with a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.

And to really copper fasten this Artic deal, another deal must be on the cards. Bigger runways in Southern Ireland to facilitate American bombers, and Northern Ireland’s shipyards to service US nuclear submarines, warships and aircraft carriers.

Such a policy for the island of Ireland would require massive investment from the White House. Unionists and nationalists alike should now wonder what will be on the political cards for the Americans to gain such a military capacity.

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
Dr Coulter has been a journalist since 1978 and is currently a political commentator with GB News.

Tactical Trump Gives Putin A Major Military Migraine

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Six

Geordie Morrow 🖌 with a painting from his collection of art work.

 
⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Beano

Merrion Press 🔖 has just published a new book by Dave Hannigan.



The Big Fight
When Ali Conquered Ireland 

Dave Hannigan


The thrilling story of Muhammad Ali’s 1972 visit to Dublin, told through interviews with dozens of those Ali met over the course of those seven unforgettable days.


On a balmy July evening in 1972, to the sound of The Dubliners, Muhammad Ali climbed through the ropes to fight Al ‘Blue’ Lewis at Croke Park. The most famous athlete in the world had somehow been inveigled to Ireland by Butty Sugrue, a charismatic entrepreneur who was ridiculed for trying to do the impossible right up to the moment Ali and his entourage touched down at Dublin Airport. And so began a week of the most glorious mayhem, as ‘the Champ’ charmed the Irish people.
Ali could be found jogging along Wicklow lanes, strolling into The Old Stand pub, chatting with street cleaners, and paying an early morning visit to the GPO to receive a history lesson about the Easter Rising. No matter where he fetched up, wonderful chaos ensued. Traffic stopped. Crowds gathered. The greatest show on earth had come to town. Through interviews with dozens of those Ali met and worked with over the course of those seven unforgettable days, Dave Hannigan has pieced together an enthralling narrative of one of the most unique events in Irish sporting history.

Paperback • €18.99|£17.99 • 256 pages • 226mm x 153mm • 9781785375460

Out Now 📚 Dave Hannigan

Dixie Elliot ✊"The Orange State is gone and it's not coming back." - Mary Lou McDonald 2019.


It has gone nowhere!!
 
The fact that the people of the Garvaghy Road still have to face down bigots who are intent on marching where they are not wanted is proof that the so called GFA had nothing to do with peace and was entirely about appeasement.
 
Appeasing bigots whose culture is based entirely on the hatred of everything Irish, and one of Unionist domination.

Political policing is still very much a fact of life for Nationalists in the North, yet the silence from the so called political representatives, including those who sit on policing boards is damning evidence that we were and continue to be sold lie upon lie.

And what is worst of all is that sectarian division still gets the politicians on both sides elected despite the fact that they have changed nothing for those people who constantly vote for them.
 
The so called political representatives who know that they don't have to do anything but turn up at the polling booths during each election and usher their voters inside like sheep to the slaughter.

The so called political representatives who have been forced to join the residents of the Garvaghy Road in an attempt to prevent something they had told them was a thing of the past.
 
The so called political representatives who insist in telling us that we are in a better place today despite the fact we clearly see that nothing has changed.

Yet they insist on asking what the alternative is.
 
The alternative is to walk away from Stormont where Carson's statue and his sectarian politics still dominates the skyline.

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

The Orange State

Atheist Ireland ★ A recent case at the European Court of Human Rights has confirmed that ethical vegan beliefs are protected, under the right to freedom of religion and belief, in the European Convention on Human Rights. 

21-August-2026

There is a parallel with Atheist Ireland’s campaigns to protect the right to freedom of religion or belief in Irish schools.

The case was GK and AS versus Switzerland, and the ruling was on 16 July. It strengthens the impact of an older related case, W versus UK in 1993, which was a decision of the old European Commission of Human Rights, not a judgment of the present Court.

What was the issue in the current case? GK was held in pre-trial detention for almost a year. A.S. was involuntarily detained in a psychiatric hospital. Both repeatedly asked for fully vegan, nutritionally sufficient meals.

The authorities tried to accommodate them, but did not consistently give them vegan food. And neither institution made a formal decision that they could appeal.

Article 9 of the European Convention protects freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, including qualifying religious and nonreligious beliefs.

The test of whether a nonreligious conviction can qualify as a protected belief includes whether it reaches a sufficient level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion, and importance. The next test is whether the behaviour in question has a sufficiently close connection with the belief.

What did the European Court conclude? It found that the applicants’ ethical veganism met both these thresholds. The belief was protected, and it was not merely a dietary preference. It flowed directly from their moral opposition to exploiting or harming animals.

And, because GK and AS were dependent on the State for food, the authorities had a positive obligation to deal properly with their request for vegan food. This does not mean that they had to comply with the request, but they had to reasonably balance the right with practical considerations.

The authorities tried to evade that by saying they had not made a decision to appeal against, but the court found that argument too formalistic. Indeed, the court found that, because GK and AS could not appeal the issue domestically, their right to an effective remedy, under Article 13, was also breached.

The judgment reinforces two principles

This judgment reinforces two important human rights principles. One is that that religious and nonreligious beliefs have the same legal protection under human rights law. If someone refuses to eat pork because of their religious beliefs, and someone else refuses to eat any animal products because of their ethical veganism, the authorities must respect both underlying beliefs equally.

Another is the difference between the State’s negative duties (to not unjustifiably interfere) and positive duties (to take reasonable action). It is not always enough for the State simply to allow someone to hold a belief. Sometimes it must take reasonable steps for them to exercise their rights effectively.

In this case, the applicants were deprived of their liberty and dependent upon the State for food. The Court found the authorities had a positive obligation to properly consider their requests and balance their beliefs against practical considerations.

There is a parallel here with Atheist Ireland’s campaign to protect the right to freedom of religion or belief in Irish schools.

In the Louise O’Keeffe child protection case, the Irish State argued her parents had chosen to send her to the school. But the European Court found she had no realistic and acceptable alternative to attending her local school, and few parents had the resources for home schooling or fee-paying schools. She also won on the issue of a lack of an effective remedy.

That case concerned the State’s positive duty to protect children from abuse, rather than freedom of religion or belief. But the underlying issue of compulsory schooling is also relevant to belief rights. The State cannot treat attendance at school as an entirely voluntary choice.

Also, the Convention separately requires the State, in exercising its functions in education, to respect parents’ religious and philosophical convictions.

This does not mean that children (through their parents) can decline to attend any subject inconsistent with their beliefs. The State can make subjects compulsory if the information is conveyed in an objective, critical and pluralistic manner, and the State does not pursue indoctrination.

But broadly speaking the two principles are similar. The more the State controls access to an activity, and the more it removes alternatives, the stronger its duty to take reasonable account of religious or philosophical beliefs.

Atheist Ireland continues to campaign for the right to respect for our philosophical beliefs in the education system.

Keep up with Atheist Ireland.

European Court Win For Vegans Strengthens Legal Recognition For Nonreligious Beliefs Including Atheism

Weekly Worker ☭ Written by Paul Demarty.

He was undoubtedly the tragic victim of an openly racist attack dog and a baying mainstream media. 

However, maintaining that Jason Arday was not guilty of plagiarism is worse than useless. We need the truth about him and, more importantly, the whole neoliberal university system.

There is a general commotion to answer the question, ‘Who killed Jason Arday?’

On one level, this is a bit silly. Though we await confirmation from a coroner or some such authority, it seems abundantly clear that he killed himself. Weeks into a media feeding frenzy, in which public allegations of plagiarism fed into a detailed examination of the spectacular life story he had retailed in his career as a celebrity academic, he had already resigned from his post at Cambridge University, and it had become clear that most of the grandiose claims he had made about his biography were false.

He had not been a non-verbal autist until the age of 11, nor illiterate at 18. He had not played for Crystal Palace, or been a pro snooker player, or run 600 miles in six days, or miraculously recovered from a brain tumour. 

Continue @ Weekly Worker.

Fraudsters, Great And Small

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