Authority must never be trusted, I thought. So what I'm saying is, I'm not big into religion. However, I do have a bit of an interest (as well as a masters degree) in the conservation of historic buildings.

Which leads me onto my topic: the right of the community to interfere in the free practise of religion in the name of protecting the built heritage.

The name 'Pugin' is central to this topic. Augustus Welby Pugin was a London architect who became famous in the mid-19th century for designing Gothic (pointed arches, gargoyles, flying buttresses, and all that) Revival buildings. At the height of his career, Pugin was the most acclaimed architect of his time. His most famous buildings were the Houses of Parliament in Westminster.

Pugin didn't complete much work in Ireland. But his eldest son, also an architect by the name of Edward Welby, was more prolific over here. His works include Killarney Cathedral, and . . . best known of all . . . the Cathedral in Cobh. Don't get me wrong, these buildings . . . especially Cobh . . . are really good examples of late 19th-century Irish architecture. But in my opinion Edward Welby was a bit of a Stella McCartney: talented, but not as good as his Beatle dad, Paul. And I do think the conservation set here in Ireland wouldn't be quite as excited about his work if he hadn't inherited an A-list last name.

Anway, you might remember a couple of years back the fatwah which was placed on the head of one of our most eminent living architects, Professor Cathal O'Neill, when he made some proposals on behalf of the Cathedral trustees to change Cobh's interior to reflect post-Vatican Two guidelines on the celebration of the liturgy. In short, he wanted to extend the altar. The problem Professor O'Neill encountered was that, after the 2000 Planning Act, the Cathedral was now considered a 'Protected Structure' which meant that absolutely nothing could be done to change the inside without prior planning permission.

Now after the introduction of the 2000 legislation, Cobh wasn't the first place of religious worship where the faithful needed to make some changes to allow them to practise their beliefs. What had happened in these earlier cases was a sort of agreement was hammered out between the elders of the various religious denominations and the department of the environment where both would 'enter into dialogue' so that the atheist rest of the population wouldn't be deprived of its cultural heritage before the religious faithful could make their necessary changes.

The guideline resulted in a few minor, middle-pages-of-the-local-paper spats where some local PP somewhere decided to swap the locations of the statues of the Virgin and St Anthony, but nothing too serious.

Then along came Cobh and the whole thing exploded. Even though the proposals that poor Prof O'Neill was making were way less controversial than the accusations of 'heritage vandalism' from the Conservation Ultras, the level of outrage expressed in contributors' letters to the Irish Times approached the apoplexy that only Michael D Higgins himself is capable of whenever he hears that the department of education is proposing to drop a four-line work by a little known Nova Scotian poet from the lower level Ulster Scots Leaving Cert paper. People really were that outraged. This, after all, was a PUGIN. Funnily enough at the time of the scandal I came across one report which mistakenly suggested that the building wasn't the work of 'Stella' Pugin but that of 'Paul The Beatle'! .

The other thing the Ultras seem to overlook is that 'Stella' himself was more than 30 years dead by the time Cobh was "nished.

The reason I'm resurrecting this old story is that rumours are flying around the religious building community that the Cathedral trustees may be about to make another application for changes to Cobh Cathedral.

Cue round two. Columns and columns of newspaper rhetoric from morally superior secularists demanding that Ireland 'bring itself into the 21st century and protect its built heritage'. And I . . . a non Christian, oldbuilding-tree-hugger . . . should be on their side.

But I'm not. And this is why: no matter how architecturally important we think a building might be, I really don't believe the state has any right to interfere in a community's freedom to practice their religion inside that building in whatever way they see fit. And, by the way, the state's intervention in the Cobh situation wasn't simply in the fact that it allowed the conservation legislation apply to churches . . . the department of the environment actually appealed the Cobh proposals to An Bord Pleanala.

I don't know, but it seems to me that freedom of worship (like freedom of speech, freedom of privacy within the home, etc) is an absolute, indivisible, essential and fundamental building block of a proper liberal democracy. Democracy is what happens after a lot of serious, adult conversation takes place about the nature of community and governance.

Last time I remember that conversation in this country was in 1916.

I'll leave you with this thought: if Jesus one day descended from heaven on an unexpected cloud, his own architect, Pugin, on his righthand side, and instructed all the Christians in the world that there'd no longer be a place for them in heaven if they didn't paint the interior of all their churches pink. What would happen to Cobh?