The Minister for Education, Ruairí Quinn (pictured), will publish legislation that will force denominational schools to employ openly gay teachers. Speaking earlier this week at the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (ASTI), he said he would look at legislation to amend Section 37 of the Employment Equality Act, the Irish Times reported. The provision...
Seventy five per cent of Catholics in Ireland say that Church teaching on sex is not relevant to them or their families, according to a new poll. The survey, carried out by Amárach Research, asked over a thousand Irish Catholics, both those who don’t attend Church as well as regular Mass-goers, “Do you believe that...
The number of applications to take children into care in the UK has gone over 10,000 for the first time, according to the latest figures. Over 800 legal proceedings were launched by councils in England to remove at-risk youngsters from their families in March alone, the Daily Telegraph reports. The children’s court advisory service dealt...
Recommendations made by the Advisory Group to the Goverment’s Forum on Patronage and Pluralism represent “a serious threat to the right to denominational education in primary schools in Ireland,” two leading Catholic academics have said. Writing in yesterday’s Irish Examiner, Prof Eamonn Conway and Dr Rik Van Nieuwenhove, who lecture in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick...
A ban on ‘sexy’ clothes for girls as young as five is to be introduced by the Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald (pictured). Items such as crop tops, high heels and t-shirts with suggestive slogans for pre-teens are to be outlawed within weeks, according to a report in the Evening Herald. The report says that...
Marie Griffin, the chief executive of County Dublin VEC, the school patron body charged with running five new multi-denominational primary schools, has defended the religious education scheme used by the schools from accusations that it “segregates” children. And she said that those who accused the new schools of “segregating young children on sectarian grounds”, were...
The leader of Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien (pictured), has called on Christians to wear a cross every day as a way of countering the marginalisation of faith from public life. In his Easter Sunday sermon, Cardinal O’Brien said: “I hope that increasing numbers of Christians adopt the practice of wearing a cross...
Certain of the recommendations in the report of the Advisory Group to the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector “would seriously undermine the identity of denominational schools”, the Iona Institute has said in a statement released today. The proposals recommend the abolition of Rule 68, which allows denominational schools to permeate their...
The majority of Conservative MPs have real doubts about whether David Cameron’s (pictured) plan to legalise same-sex marriage will succeed, according to The Daily Telegraph, and a majority of all MPs say that the law is of little importance to their constituents. According to an all-party poll of MPs, only 41 per cent of Conservatives...
Egg and sperm donation should be as obvious as giving blood, the UK’s fertility watchdog has said. The comments come a week after the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), tripled the payment to women donating their eggs from £250 to £750 per cycle of donation. The remarks ignore the concerns of thousands of donor-offspring,...
