By Dr Angelo Bottone An article in The Irish Times this week presents Italy as an example of how granting doctors the right not to perform abortions can harm women. However, the writer bases her case on some very erroneous information, never mind the substance of her argument. Laura Fano Morrisey, an Italian pro-choice activist,...
The Sisters of Charity have just announced that they are quitting their three Dublin hospitals. They say from now on the hospitals will be governed by “national and international best practice guidelines on medical ethics and the laws of the Republic of Ireland.” (What does this imply about what is happening now?) This begs a...
The headline in the Journal.ie article read: “Women in full-time employment work for free for one month each year.” Taken on its own, this is incredibly misleading because the average person will think that women get paid 14pc less than men for working the same hours in the same job. Delve into the article by...
The BBC last week aired a three-part TV drama called ‘Three Girls’. Based closely on real life events it focussed on three girls who were systematically abused by mostly middle-aged men who came mostly from the Pakistani community. The girls were failed in multiple ways. One way, insufficiently noted, was by today’s sexual mores which helped to...
Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland, has presented the usual litany of discrimination allegedly suffered by atheists and religious minorities in Ireland in an article for The Irish Times this week. He calls a more secular state. But what kind of secular State? The kind he wants would have almost no place for religion in public...
It could “disturb the conscience of women who, in accordance with the law, have made personal life choices”, the court in France ruled last November. What might “disturb” their consciences? The answer is an ad which tells mothers carrying a Down Syndrome baby in their wombs that life with a Down Syndrome child can be...
Have we reached peak anti-Catholicism in Ireland? Perhaps I’m being optimistic, but I have a feeling the answer might be yes. In the last few weeks we have had story after story that has ignited and then reignited the tremendous reservoir of anger that exists in this country towards the Catholic Church. This might make...
In 2015, Ireland passed one of the most radical ‘gender recognition’ laws in the world. The law said your body and your sex (or ‘gender’) are totally unrelated to one another. That law applied only to people aged 18 and over. An amendment will now extend the law to those aged 16 and over, but...
The stories we find most shocking are the ones that offend our deepest values. However, because it is liberals who dominate the public space, it is the stories which shock them, that get the most attention. Other, equally shocking stories get almost no attention, like this story about the company that has turned embryos into a form of...
Fintan O’Toole in his Irish Times column this week ridiculed the very idea of having an ethos and mocked Catholics for having one, but can anyone really live without an ethos? O’Toole thinks that ‘ethos’ is a Latin word. He has either never read or has forgotten about Aristotle’s Ethics, one the foundational texts of...
