DCU’s Secular and Sceptic Society plans to convince the Students’ Union to make campaigning for a secular Ireland part of their policy next year.
The main aim of the society is to fight for the separation of the church and state at a university, local, national and international level. Their proposal for the change of the Students’ Union policy will be submitted to the first class representative council (CRC) meeting of the coming year.
According to one of the societies founding members and Vice Auditor & PRO, Sean Cassidy, the main work right now is going into writing the proposal and making sure it’s iron clad.
“The reaction has been very positive from the SU executive, but the reaction in general is positive”, Mr Cassidy said. “A survey completed by the DCU SU last year showed that a sizable majority of DCU students do believe in a healthy separation of church and state.”
The society’s first event of the year will be two separate questions and answers session with guest speakers on the X case and/or abortion. Independent TD, Clare Daly will be speaking for pro-choice, while Independent Senator Ronan Mullen will be speaking for pro-life. Daly will be in DCU on Wednesday 10th October, 6pm and Mullen on Thursday 11th October, 6pm. The Venue has yet to be announced.
DCU’s Secular and Sceptic Society was founded last year from the idea of Sean Cassidy and Nathan Wheeler. They had a vision of a secular Ireland and in their research discovered that there was no dedicated secular association in Ireland and no student led association.
The society have recently announced that a referendum will be held on the decision to change the name of the organisation to just “The Secular Society”. A democratic vote among the members will determine the final name.
Their first AGM had an attendance of around 30 to 40 people but the society continues to grow with their website getting over 100 views a day.
At the moment the society are completely focused on Clubs and Socs Day and ensuring that they have as big a presence as possible and attract as many interested students as they can to the cause.
An article written by members of the society about secularism in Ireland for the online news site, Thejournal.ie has started to attract a lot of attention with over 7,500 views. Mr Cassidy told us that the reaction was overwhelmingly positive and that it had “garnered a lot of interest among our members and a number of post grads in DCU and in other Irish universities”.
Adam Higgins is our Deputy News Editor
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