Schools in Ireland have always been used to enforce religious belief. For far too long teachers and administrators have been concerned to turn out “good Catholics” or “good Protestants” to the detriment of children’s education. Religion is a private matter. If parents wish to teach their children about their faith they are free to do so. Teaching religion at school is not only a waste of time and money, it is also an insidious way to impose the majority religion on those who don’t share it.

In recent years schools have become more secular but there is still much work to be done if religion is to be removed from public education. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, an inordinate amount of my time at school was spent learning about religion (or rather, learning about Christianity since other religions got scant mention). Prayers were said at assembly and evolution was presented as merely “a theory” which we were free to disregard. I resent that so much time was spent trying to indoctrinate me when I could’ve been learning something useful (like a foreign language).

Because of this, I have always looked on the French system with envy. Education, like all other public spheres, is fiercely secular. By steadfastly keeping religion out of the public sphere, France can be a state of all its citizens be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim or atheist. You can shilly-shally around this issue all you like but it’s very simple – any state which is not secular discriminates against those who don’t share the state religion. No-one should ever accept anything other than first-class citizenship.

I have a lot of sympathy for the strand of thought in France which wants to ban all religious symbols - the hijab, the yarmulke, the crucifix, the turban – from the classroom. I would have no problem supporting this if the argument was cast purely in terms of the need for secularism. Unfortunately this is not the case.

The debate about religious symbols in school is not just about the separation of church and state, it is also about the integration of the Muslim minority in France. Those who wish to ban all symbols often speak of the hijab as if it were the only garment in question. Some see a ban on wearing the hijab as a way to end what they see as the oppression of Muslim girls by their fathers. I’m not going to get into the rights and wrongs of the hijab except to say that it’s the wrong argument to make in this case.

If banning religious symbols in French schools is about secularism then I’m all in favour. If however it’s a way for the French government to impose “western culture” on Muslims then I’m against it. By focussing on the hijab, proponents of a ban have undermined their own case and strengthened global Islamic opposition to the move.