Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

To be honest, the Minister has not provided the clarity I am seeking. Do people still have the right to opt out of religious education in favour of alternative subject choices? The Minister's failure to give me a clear answer suggests they do not have that right in some instances. I was also a philosophy student. At my first philosophy lecture in UCD, a priest who was a member of Opus Dei - there were many of them in the UCD philosophy department - said that before he and his colleagues started to teach us about all the great philosophers, he wanted us to know that Karl Marx, Nietzsche and a whole load of other secular radical philosophers were not philosophers. He said that St. Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher. That was the start of our philosophical education. It was informed by the Catholic religion through and through and that is how it followed. We cannot have that.

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