Social workers will not be given new and additional powers to intervene in families under the Government’s planned children’s referendum, according to a report in the Irish Independent. Currently, the Constitution only allows the State to remove children from their families “in exceptional cases” where parents, for physical or moral reasons, fail in their duty...
Only 81 same-sex couples so far have notified the General Registrar Office (GRO) of their intent to enter into a civil partnership, according to a report in the Irish Times. The GRO received 18 notices of intention to enter a civil partnership up to January 10th. A further 63 appointments to give notice of an...
The Government has provisionally signed off on the wording of a constitutional amendment enshrining children’s rights. It is believed that a wording will be published shortly, once a minor technical issue is resolved in the coming days, the Irish Times reported on Thursday. The latest text is understood to be broadly based on the work...
Inspectors from the Teaching Council have accused Mary Immaculate teacher training college of spending too much time on religion. The report by the Council said that the time allocated for religion in the college was four times that for science. It also found that the time allocated for visual arts and Irish was four times...
Divorced people had the highest rate of hospitalisation in psychiatric units last year, according to new figures from the Health Research Board (HRB). The figures show that the rate of hospitalisation for divorced people was 115.9 per 100,000, nearly twice the national average of 66.3 per 100,000. The HRB carry out a census in March...
The Pope has delivered his most robust defence of religious freedom to date once again accusing some Western countries of attempting to marginalise religion, remove religious symbols from public view and of overriding the conscience rights of religious believers. In his annual address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, Pope Benedict also drew attention to the...
The head of the Catholic Education Service (CES) in England and Wales, Bishop Malcolm McMahon, has said that Catholic schools feel under constant attack from critics of faith-based education. Bishop McMahon, said that the secularists, teachers’ leaders and their “friends in parliament” who call for the abolition of faith schools received more publicity than they...
US passports will no longer contain the words “mother” and “father”, the State Department has said. They are to be replaced with gender neutral terminology. “The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. “They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’” Pro-family...
Quebec’s publicly funded nurseries run by faith groups have been instructed not to teach children anything about the religion they profess by the province’s Family Minister, Yolande James. The nurseries, known as day-care centres, have been told to eliminate all activities that involve the “transmission of faith” by June. The ban on “teaching a belief,...
More than two-thirds of women say if they had young children they would prefer to stay at home with them rather than go out to work according to a new opinion poll. The survey of 922 women, commissioned by The Sunday Times, asked respondents: ‘If you had young children and were in a financial position...
