A closer look shows that the language used in the survey is somewhat ambiguous, and the reporting potentially confusing.
On the issue of funding religious education, for example, the question states: In your opinion should schools providing one type of religious education and one type of religious observance be funded by ...? In other words, the focus of the question is about non-inclusive faith-based education rather than broadly-based curriculum RE. In the section in the report titled 'Main responsibility for religious education', the actual question asked is Who do you think the main responsibility for teaching children about religion and faith should lie with?
In both cases the phrase religious education seems to be used in the sense of 'education into a religion' rather than education about religion more generally. It may be the case that there is a good deal of education into religion in Northern Ireland, but not all RE matches this narrow description.
Elsewhere the survey tells us that the vast majority of people surveyed (87%) believe that schools should be welcoming of all faiths and none. This is not evidence for abandoning Religious Education but for ensuring that it is an inclusive subject, capable of creating young people who understand religion in a broad sense, who are not threatened by religious difference, who have the skills of dialogue and who are comfortable with their own religious or non-religious identity.
Perhaps one conclusion from this discussion is that the current debate about the future of education in Northern Ireland could be helped by greater accuracy when using phrases such as 'religious education','faith-schools' or 'non-denominational RE', but an additional conclusion is that that our schools and RE teachers must be more explicit about what goes on in their RE classrooms (whether 'education into a religion', 'learning about religion' or 'learning from religion') and are able to defend it in the light of increasingly hard questions about its value in a shared future.
Copies of the full report can be found at the IEF website.