Andrew Madden, a victim of abuse at the hands of a priest, left the Catholic Church years ago for perfectly understandable reasons. It would be very hard to remain a practising Catholic having been abused by a cleric and knowing that Church leaders did not do enough to bring the perpetrator to justice.

Now Andrew Madden has formally left the Church using a procedure under canon law that allows for 'defection'. This was on the front page of The Irish Times yesterday although it seems to me that it hardly warranted the front page given the fact that Madden lapsed years ago.

Until recently almost no-one, including probably most bishops, even knew that there existed a formal defection process under canon law. It was only introduced a few years ago at the behest of the German bishops. In Germany church-goers pay a small tax that goes directly to their Church and a way was introduced for Germans to formally renounce membership of their Church so as to no longer pay the tax. (I understand that the only change tax-wise is that the tax is no longer paid to the Church but instead goes to some other organisation. That is, you don't get off the tax!).

In any event, a group of atheists here in Ireland learnt of this procedure via, I think, Italian atheists, and set up a website called 'Count me out'.

Since it was set up RTE and The Irish Times have given it plenty of publicity. Naturally. Despite this, only a few thousand people have availed of the facility and you can be sure that almost 100 percent of these people had already lapsed, like Andrew Madden.

Maybe someone should set up an alternative website called 'Count me in'?