A controversy over prayer and the place of religion in public life has erupted in Cork, Ireland’s second-biggest city. Pádraig Rice, a newly elected city councilor for the Social Democratic Party, introduced a motion at a meeting on July 8 calling for the end of the practice of beginning city council meetings with prayer. His motion also calls for the removal of a crucifix from the council chamber.
The call was met with firm opposition from other members of the council. Councilor Ken O’Flynn told reporters that he intends to “stand firm against these misguided attempts to erase our traditions.” Based on the available records, opening city council meetings in Cork with prayer seems to date back to at least 1960, and the text that is read mirrors the Catholic prayer that was instituted in the nation’s parliament, the Dáil, in 1932.
This is not the first time that objections have been raised about practices related to Ireland’s dominant Catholic faith connected to civic events. Mr. Rice’s counterpart in the Green Party on the city council, Oliver Moran, confirmed to the media that he has refused to stand for the prayer since last year as a form of respectful protest. He argues that “it is illegal to require someone to participate in prayer in the workplace.” (The daily prayer in the Dáil has also been challenged, but as of now it still stands.)
In comments on his motion to end the prayer and remove the crucifix, Mr. Rice described it as one element in a broader “modernization agenda” so that the practices of the city council better reflect the increasing religious diversity of Cork.
The motion was referred to a committee called the Corporate Policy Group without debate. Mr. Rice intends to pursue the issue again when that group issues its report on the motion.
Mr. Rice told America that he had been aware that council meetings began with prayer before he was elected, “but when I was in the chamber, it did strike me more—it did feel more prominent than maybe I had anticipated.” He said his motion was not directly inspired by a sense of alienation felt as an agnostic or non-religious person coerced to participate in an act of worship, but because “the people who elect us come from all faiths and none…and that needs to be respected and reflected.”
Raised as a Catholic, Mr. Rice said he would welcome beginning the council meetings with a moment of reflection so that “people can draw on their own spirituality, their own religion or their own thoughts in that moment,” but he worries that the present arrangement is exclusionary because “all of our actions, all of our words are directed through this one religious belief.”
Though the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution might seem to discourage prayer before civic events, so-called legislative prayer has been tolerated in the United States since its earliest days, and the U.S. Congress opens each session with a prayer.
Across Europe, prayer before government meetings remains common. Councils in Germany and the United Kingdom (as well as in non-European nations like Australia) begin with prayer and often feature prominent religious iconography in debating chambers. Indeed, the practice is spreading in Germany, where one of its most vocal opponents has been the Catholic Church itself, worried that using Christian symbols and speech in political contexts harms the common good and diminishes the faith.
A larger cultural struggle
While this is a small debate within a regional council, the conversation that Mr. Rice has initiated reflects a larger cultural struggle that Irish society may soon have to confront.
Until recently, the Republic of Ireland has been characterized by a remarkably high level of religiosity—almost exclusively Catholic. As late as the 1970s, about 90 percent of Catholics attended Mass on a weekly basis. But today, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic, that attendance rate has likely been cut by more than half. With the explosive growth of the “nones,” those who profess no religion, as well as the arrival of Muslim, Hindu, Christian Orthodox and evangelical communities through immigration, the place of Catholicism as the de facto religious expression of the Irish State is no longer settled.
Mr. Rice said he is among those “nones” who hope to see the emergence of “a modern, pluralist republic where we have a separation of church and state,” and his motion to end public prayer in Cork is intended as a step in that direction. The final result of such changes remains unclear, however.
Sweden might offer the Irish Republic a look at a possible future, but even in that strongly secular society, lingering practices of the former established church remain. To this day, church tithing is administered directly through the state’s taxation service.
Germany fits most people’s ideas of a secular state, but its “Basic Law” constitution begins with a description of the nation’s responsibility to God. The United Kingdom is a secular and pluralist state, but England has an established church, its “supreme governor” is the reigning monarch, and that church’s senior bishops sit in the House of Lords.
France is a secular state, but perhaps not a role model. Its secularity is so unaccommodating to religiosity that some Muslim citizens are not welcome at local beaches if they are wearing “burkini” swimwear.
How Ireland navigates these questions remains to be seen. Mr. Rice grants that he “hasn’t really thought about…a model or framework” for a purely secular Ireland. He prefers for now to consider public religiosity on an issue-by-issue basis.
Another question involves the ubiquity of government-supported Catholic schools across the country. Almost 90 percent of primary school students attend a Catholic school, even though a much smaller number of that age cohort—72 percent—are baptized Catholics.
Mr. Rice sees in that statistical discrepancy an element of the secular modernization he hopes to see achieved in Ireland. “I think we need to think about education and health care as well,” he said. “It’s definitely a concern—the lack of choice that parents have in terms of schooling.”
But if that project is pursued in an ad hoc fashion, said Alan Hynes, the chief executive of the Catholic Education Partnership, there could be problems. In his survey of education systems across Europe, Mr. Hynes speaks of encountering a great diversity and openness to how societies engage questions of faith. He notes that the French approach of laïcité might appear at first to be hostile to all religious expression, but “secular France actually provides state funding to private Catholic schools.”
Similarly, in the Netherlands, long seen as one of the leading progressive nations in the world, a constitutionally protected right for parents to be able to educate their children “in keeping with their convictions and beliefs” has been consistently respected.
While he has no strong opinion on the question of prayer in council meetings, Mr. Hynes is concerned that a lack of consideration for the role of religion in the lives of the Irish people will harm its democracy. How Ireland navigates these conversations in education, health care and other areas of overlap between religious institutions and the state, he said, matters for reasons beyond tradition.
He agrees with Mr. Rice that Ireland is increasingly a society marked by diversity of religious belief, but he cautions that secularists may achieve the opposite of the inclusiveness they claim to seek. If “the only way we can deal with difference is by essentially obliterating it from the public square,” he said, Ireland may succeed only in excluding people with strong religious and cultural convictions.
This is especially the case with the communities that have migrated to Ireland more recently. They include Pentecostal Christians from Africa, Eastern European Orthodox Christian believers, Muslims from across North Africa and the Arab world and a rapidly growing Hindu community. Irish democracy may miss out on important new voices if the response to growing religious diversity is to flatten religious expression entirely.
Mr. Rice insisted instead that secularity in Ireland—whatever model is embraced in the end—can be an expression of “respect for religion and diversity.” It is exactly out of respect for religious belief that the traditional practice of Catholic-rooted prayer should be brought to an end, he said.
But Mr. Hynes may be right in suggesting that the best of intentions on these questions do not necessarily generate the best of outcomes. If Ireland is going to forge its own unique response to religious pluralism, there has to be more to it than the cessation of prayer.
