Labour’s Eoin Holmes has done spectacularly badly in the Meath East by-election. Holmes ran in part on a social issues agenda. He made lots of noise about Labour’s stance on abortion and same-sex marriage, and had Ivana Bacik (pictured) as a prominent part of his campaign. It did him no good whatsoever. Clearly voters in...
Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald wants money diverted from Child Benefit into State-subsidised child care. She believes children will benefit, especially educationally, from this. However, research showing that children benefit from early child care is based mainly on children from disadvantaged backgrounds and therefore she should be very slow to extrapolate from this to the general...
Maria Steen of The Iona Institute debates the Government’s proposed abortion legislation with Choice Ireland’s Sinéad Ahern on CNN’s Connect the World with Becky Anderson. You can watch the debate here. (The debate proper starts at 3m 10sec in.)
David Cameron’s (pictured) plan to introduce same-sex marriage may be still on track, but it has already brought deep fissures within his own party to the surface, and these divisions are only set to grow. He has been forced to grant his MPs a free vote, but that has not quelled the rebellion. Many Tory...
On Wednesday, columnist and author John Waters spoke to a packed meeting of the Iona Institute on the subject of ‘Ireland and the Abolition of God’. John said that Irish culture has created a situation in which it is impermissable to speak about God or transcendental truths in public.. He quoted Pope Benedict who...
Ruairi Quinn (pictured) will be noting again the amount of time spent teaching religion and Irish in our primary schools. The results of the latest international school literacy and numeracy tests conducted among 50 countries were released this week. Ireland is doing well, but perhaps not well enough. Ireland was very near the top in...
Divorce, cohabitation and births out of wedlock are all very high in Sweden. How do Swedish children fare as a result? Not bad at all, reckons renowned economist, Paul Krugman, and he credits Sweden’s lavish welfare state with this. But he’s wrong, as this blog by sociologist Brad Wilcox shows. In fact, by the time...
The Irish Human Right Commission has made a submission to the High Court in which it effectively calls for the legalisation of assisted suicide. They made the submission in a case involving a woman suffering from Multiple Sclerosis who is arguing that she has a human right to have someone assist her suicide. The IHRC’s...
And so the convention on our mercilessly caricatured Constitution has begun. The caricature of it is easy to spell out; it is a Catholic document heavily influenced by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and it is utterly of its time. It is to be fervently hoped, therefore, that the Convention members had a good listen to...
In the past week polling company MRNI has been publishing a series of polls in the Irish Times on various aspects of life in Ireland, including religion. One of the most disappointing figures in the poll from the secular lobby’s point of view was that some 87 per cent of 18-34-year-olds still believe in God....
