The number of people requesting to die by euthanasia in Holland rose by 13pc last year to 4,188, new figures show. The figures were published for the five regional committees responsible for ensuring the legal conditions for euthanasia are met, website DutchNews reports. Euthanasia requests have risen steadily since 2006 when 1,923 people applied for...
The Christian victims of terrorist attacks in Pakistan were martyrs to their faith, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (pictured) has said. He described the suicide bombing of a church in Pakistan which killed at least 80 people as “appalling” and said the victims were “martyrs”. However, the Anglican church leader said he had prayed...
The Government has no plans to introduce a law to outlaw slapping or “reasonable chastisement” of children in the home, Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald (pictured) has told the UN in a report. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child had called on Ireland to “explicitly prohibit all forms of corporal punishment in the...
The Government has set up a committee to draw up guidelines for implementing its abortion legislation. It is believed it will take at three months before the committee reports back to Cabinet. The committee met for the first time this week. It is believed the summer holidays delayed the formation of the committee, the Irish...
The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Nils Wahl, has said that an Irish woman who had a child through surrogacy had no automatic right under EU law to adoption leave. Mr Wahl said the woman, a teacher referred to as Mrs Z, was not discriminated against on the grounds of gender...
One of Ireland’s main Catholic hospitals, the Mater, has said that it will carry out abortions under the Government’s legislation, passed earlier this year. Its stance is at odds with that of the Catholic Church here, which condemned the legislation. The statement comes after one of the members of the hospital’s directors, Fr Kevin Doran,...
Stay-at-home mothers are being forced into paid work in huge numbers in the UK, as controversial Government reforms hit single income families, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph. New official figures show that almost 200,000 women in two parent families with dependent children have re-entered the workplace since 2011. More women have moved...
Stay-at-home mothers in the UK will be “stigmatised” by Labour’s plans to offer parents 25 hours a week of free childcare, campaigners have warned. Presently, all children aged between three and four are entitled to 15 hours of free child care a week. But yesterday Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls (pictured) promised that if the...
Parents around the country have been invited to give their opinion on how to make ‘stand-alone’ Catholic schools more ‘inclusive’. Critics say this will water down the ethos of denominational schools. Parents are being asked to give their views on how to make prayers more ‘inclusive’, how to make the display of religious symbols more...
There has been a steep decline since 1998 in the number of Irish children being raised by both parents, according to a new study. The report, Health Behaviour in School-aged Children, showed that, while 91.4 per cent of Irish children lived with both parents in 1998, less than three quarters, or 73.7 per cent lived...
