An independent online teacher-training institution has been pressured into removing material criticising atheism from its religion course for primary teachers. Atheist Ireland objected to a religion module being used by Hibernia College, which contained some remarks which said that atheist humanism “produced the worst horrors history has ever witnessed” and that atheism was “not a...
Ireland will defend our education system against accusations that it is guilty of de facto religious when a Government delegation appears before the UN Human Rights Council next week. However, the Government has partially accepted a recommendation to amend legislation which allows denominational schools to protect their ethos through their hiring policies. In a report...
Over three quarters of British people believe that introducing new laws permitting same-sex marriage should not be a priority of the Government, according to a new poll. In an ICM survey for The Sunday Telegraph, voters said that such legislation should not be fast tracked while other issues such as the economy and public-service reform...
Religious parents from the Canadian province of Alberta say they are gravely concerned about new legislation which a government spokesperson has said would ban schools from teaching aspects of traditional sexual morality as part of their curriculum. A spokesperson for the province’s Education Minister, Thomas Lukaszuk, told news website LifeSiteNews last week that faith-based schools...
Religious institutions have been exempted from having to provide health insurance plans which include abortion inducing drugs and contraception by the lower house of the New Hampshire legislature. The vote was the latest in a national effort against President Obama’s healthcare mandate which require all insurance plans, even those sponsored by religious institutions, to provide...
Between 15pc and 20pc of nine-year-olds are growing up with “significant levels of emotional or behaviour problems” according to a major Government-funded study of children’s wellbeing. The study, Growing Up in Ireland, also found that children in single-parent households, as well as those in more economically disadvantaged families, “displayed higher levels of social and emotional...
Seven out of 10 people in the UK agree that marriage should remain a “life-long exclusive commitment between a man and a woman”. The British Government is currently planning to introduce same-sex marriage and the main Churches have launched campaigins against the proposal The ComRes survey carried out for Catholic Voices also found strong support...
New figures from the Central Statistics Office confirm that the vast majority of women who work part-time want to work part-time and are not seeking full-time work. The figures, contained in the latest Quarterly National Household Survey, found that 73pc of part-time working women say they are not underemployed as against only 27pc of women...
Married adults who undergo heart surgery are more than three times as likely as single people who have the same surgery to survive the next three months, according to a new study. The lead author of the study, Ellen Idler, a sociologist at Emory University, said it showed “a dramatic difference in survival rates for...
Protestant schools are “under a creeping threat” the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Most Rev Michael Jackson (pictured) has claimed. Speaking at a conference of the Church of Ireland Primary School Management Association last weekend he said he was not sure whether such schools were “in a cynical way being left to starve through...
