Rite&Reason: Irish religious minorities locked out of civic life

At a recent meeting between the Taoiseach and faith communities, I suggested that the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted inequalities that have long existed in Irish society where religious minorities are concerned.

More familiar to people are pay and gender inequality, and inequality in accessing healthcare. Less apparent to the majority Christian population are the inequalities within the national religious landscape. These endure and it’s time that we addressed them.

Take the provision of space. The main Christian denominations have inherited a large portfolio of intergenerational wealth. Their large buildings have allowed them to continue to worship while respecting social distancing throughout this pandemic. For religious minorities, the story is different.

Placed in the precarity of renting small spaces to practise their faith, religious minorities have been left without a home in this crisis. It does not need to be like this.

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In Berlin, Copenhagen and elsewhere, local and national governments have responded to their new diversity by providing neutral public spaces for multifaith worship. These are used for services, weddings, funerals and other events by those from minority faith traditions, and by those of no faith.

Renting small spaces to practise their faith, religious minorities have been left without a home in this crisis

They are a practical attempt to deliver equality for religious minorities – something the State is not doing. Indeed, the current situation is in contravention of the Equal Status Acts 2000-2018, which prohibit discrimination on religious and other grounds in the provision of goods and services, accommodation and education within the State.

Spiritual space

But space provision is just the beginning. Religious minorities are locked out of chaplaincy services in Ireland as, usually, a degree in Christian theology is required to work as a chaplain. This means that Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and others are effectively barred from working as chaplains.

While there is a conspicuous lack of a diverse chaplaincy here, the same is not true in the US and UK, where chaplains from minority faiths are commonplace. One way of tackling this is to take Norway’s example, and provide a multifaith degree as a gateway to chaplaincy and not limiting it to Christians only.

Education is another area where the State is failing in its obligations under equality legislation. Many Irish citizens still have no choice but to send their children to Catholic or Protestant schools – because there’s no other option or the promised option isn’t ready.

Non-practising Christians continue to pose as devout to gain access to certain schools. Citizens have been let down by successive governments, which have not provided the secular or “Educate Together” schools that many Irish families need. There is a glaring inequality in “service provision” and “accommodation” in this regard.

From many perspectives, there is a startling lag in provision. Despite the realities of Irish life having changed, our national institutions, media, education system, hospitals, hospices, universities and funeral directors are not keeping up.

Religious protocol

Churches still fully control the chaplaincy services in many “secular” universities. When a person from a minority faith is dying or near death in a hospital or hospice, the carers have no idea who to call; they have no idea of the religious protocol.

There's a Catholic-Protestant binary. To be accommodating of religious minorities is to have a token Protestant

Covid has thrown this all into sharp relief. But it’s merely highlighting what has long been a problem: an unwillingness to accommodate our religious diversity – and even an illiteracy in the face of this religious diversity.

Because of our history, there's a persistent Catholic-Protestant binary here. To be accommodating of religious minorities is often to have a token Protestant presence, in order to "tick that box". Yet even in the 18th century, Wolfe Tone offered the third box of "Dissenter". At its earliest conception, our Republic had an inclusive vision that we're still failing to live up to.

What we have is a magnificent opportunity. Having never become a secular country, we can become a post-secular one, avoiding the divisive and alienating shortcomings of French hard secularism.

We can envisage a new version of secularity, where religious, spiritual and humanist values inform a pluralist civic life, faced with urgent realities that require urgent responses, informed by ethics, responsibility, justice, fairness and the solidarity of community.

But our notion of what constitutes our national religious community needs to be updated. Because, as things stand, Irish religious minorities have been locked out of much of civic life. Covid has highlighted that this inequality, like so many others, continues to stubbornly persist.

Rev Myozan Kodo Kilroy is a Soto Zen Buddhist priest and guiding teacher at Zen Buddhism Ireland. He represents Buddhism on the Dublin City Interfaith Forum. He teaches at the TU Dublin School of Media