Fintan O'Toole: I've had a lot of interesting reaction to a piece I wrote recently on the President, Mrs McAleese. I suggested that it was unfair to accuse her of blandness while the source of her deepest convictions - her Catholic faith - is regarded as virtually off-limits for the holder of a public office.
The reaction I've had suggests that many people who are motivated by religious faith now feel as if their convictions have come to be regarded as a social embarrassment, like halitosis or a passion for Daniel O'Donnell. And if that is the case there is clearly something deeply dysfunctional about our notions of pluralism, a deep unease about the relationship between private conviction and the public good.
The decline of Catholic practice in Ireland has been so dramatic that it's not all that surprising that it has left us rather confused. If Catholicism had simply collapsed, things would at least be pretty clear. Instead what we've ended up with is an utterly changed landscape full of old familiar landmarks. The ground has shifted forever but many of the old buildings still stand. Practising Catholics are now a minority in the Republic of Ireland. A Prime Time/TNS mrbi poll last year showed that just 44 per cent of people who regard themselves as Catholics attend Mass at least once a week. A clear majority, in other words, are not, by the Church's own standards, practising their faith. Yet very many of those people are not non-Catholics either. They retain an occasional, often ambivalent, relationship with the Church.
What we've got, in other words, is a society not yet diverse enough in terms of religious belief to be comfortably pluralist but vastly too diverse to be comfortably theocratic. New Churches, agnosticism and atheism are rapidly rising. But there are still far more believing Christians in the Irish population than in most European societies, and there is still a large hinterland of lapsed or occasional Catholics who have no very clear way of defining themselves in religious terms. Key Church dogmas - weekly Mass-going, hostility to artificial contraception and homosexuality, opposition to women priests - have the assent of a relatively small minority even of Catholics. Yet many people who emphatically reject these dogmas still see themselves as good Catholics.
When things are this complicated, the natural reaction is to treat all religion as a purely private affair. In some areas, it is and should be. People who act for the State - politicians, guards, teachers, civil servants, doctors, nurses - have a serious responsibility to respect the diversity of those they serve. At the same time, though, it needs to be acknowledged that many people get involved in public life because of their religious faith. To take but one example, it would be absurd to welcome the selfless and often powerful contributions to debates on social policy from the St Vincent de Paul Society without accepting that those selfless interventions are inspired by Catholic belief.
We need a genuine pluralism in which people can feel comfortable with the expression in public life of ideals inspired by different systems of belief. Spiritual and intellectual traditions - from those of the mainstream Churches to those of newer faiths to those of science and atheistic humanism - are in essence languages, and there is no reason why anyone should be made to feel embarrassed about speaking their native tongue.
This cuts both ways, however. If snobbery and intolerance create one of the barriers to a genuine pluralism, a lingering desire for Church power remains a huge roadblock. The Church took hold of large parts of the public realm in the 19th century and it still hasn't learned to let go. Writing in these pages yesterday, Monsignor James Cassin, executive secretary of the Commission for Education of the Irish Bishops' Conference, told us that "the Catholic Church accepts, and is comfortable with, the existence of the secular state". Yet he made this statement in the course of a hardliner insistence that the Church should continue to control the bulk of the primary school system.
The system of control in which the local bishop is ex officio the patron of most primary schools is an increasingly absurd anachronism. There are 24,000 primary teachers. Just over 400 - one in 60 - of them are members of religious orders. State spending on primary education is approaching €2 billion a year. Yet a system funded by a secular state and run to an overwhelming extent by lay people is still run according to the ethos of one Church. It is also specifically allowed by Irish law to discriminate against children of other faiths. A Catholic primary school can't keep out a Traveller child or a child with a disability or a child from a racial or ethnic minority. But it can keep out the child of a Protestant, a Hindu or an atheist. Religion is thus defined, not as an aspect of an inclusive society, but as a unique ground for exclusion and discrimination.
Catholics who really want to be able to express their faith in public life should be the first to want to scrap systems which define their faith as an embattled institution struggling to hold on to temporal power. They should recognise that the best way to advance the freedom to be yourself is to insist on the same freedom for everyone.