End of Life Ireland (EOLI), a group campaigning for the legalisation of euthanasia, held a public meeting in Dublin last week to present their views. It was a revealing insight into their objectives and how to get there. The main speaker was Greg Mewett, a palliative care doctor from Australia who believes that patients have...
What Pope John Paul II called ‘the culture of death’ is steadily working its way through our societies and healthcare systems. Yet another example comes from Canada, now the world’s leading exponent of so-called ‘assisted dying’. It involves a Catholic hospital in the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia, which refused to permit a patient...
The ‘housewife’, which is a woman who stayed at home to raise her children and look after the home, used to be a very common figure. The ‘househusband’ was extremely rare, and still is. New American figures show that today 26pc of mothers and 7pc of fathers are stay-at-home parents. The number of stay-at-home mothers...
Happiness levels are declining in the United States, according to a new study, and one big factor seems to explain this, namely falling marriage rates. Conversely, married people are significantly happier than the unmarried. Sam Peltzman, professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, has studied trends and differences in happiness among the US population...
We rightly hear a lot in the media about rising levels of homelessness. What we hear less often is that the single biggest cause of homelessness in the case of families is what a new report calls ‘relationship breakdowns/family circumstances’ rather than termination notices. It is the second biggest cause for single households. The ‘Homeless...
The hearing of the Oireachtas committee on the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) in Ireland has probably revealed a lot more of the agenda of some of its proponents than they intended. For example, at one of the sessions, Senator Lynn Ruane suggested that so called “assisted dying” should be offered to those...
David Quinn of the Iona Institute was interviewed on Premier Christian Radio in the UK about the draft of a new Social Personal and Health Education programme for Leaving Certificate students. He expresses concerns about what it will teach about abortion, sexual consent, gender ideology, “allyship” and “privilege”. He says if denominational schools are forced...
Introduction: Ireland has witnessed some very dramatic social changes in the last decades and we see these strongly at work in the area of family life. We have witnessed a decline in the rate of marriage, a huge growth in the number of people who are divorced or separated, a decline in the fertility rate...
A woman who was arrested while praying in silence outside an abortion clinic in the UK was in Dublin on Saturday for the Rally for Life and told a gathering before the march about her ordeal. Some local councils in Britain have introduced exclusion zones outside centres that provide abortions and the Irish government wants...
David Quinn, Chief Executive of The Iona Institute, recently delivered the 4th Rosemary Sheehan Memorial Lecture. His theme was ‘In Defence of Catholic Healthcare’. In his talk, he reminded people of the immense contribution Catholics have made to healthcare in Ireland and worldwide both historically and down to the present day. He explained the origins...
