Catholic Church had no special privileges in Tilson case

THE Irish Times religious affairs correspondent, Patsy McGarry, criticised me at length in these pages last Saturday for what I had written about the Tilson case of 1951, but he didn’t manage to find a single inaccuracy in what I said.

My point was that the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Tilson case was far from being sectarian in nature, and should not be represented as such.

In that case, a father who had promised to raise his children as Catholic removed the children from the family home and placed them in a Church of Ireland-run home.