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....
We are accustomed to being told that the pro-life movement is full of extremists who are abusive towards their opponents and will not allow a ‘rational, reasonable’ debate to take place on the issue of abortion. In this blog we show that much of the extremism now resides on the other side of this debate....
The latest poll on same-sex marriage published in The Irish Times yesterday convinces me more than ever that a referendum on the matter would lose if the campaign is even remotely fair and balanced. The poll showed 53pc support for a change to the definition of marriage, but that is down a massive 20 points...
In the last few days, Iona Institute board member, Maria Steen, has been on a number of programmes debating the abortion issue, including the Prime Time special which featured the interview with Praveen Halappanavar, the husband of Savita. Maria also appeared on Frontline on Monday night, and on Newstalk’s Sunday Show at the weekend. Please...
How did the US election go from a Catholic point of view, not just the general election, but the various ballots as well? In the three states where same-sex marriage was on the ballot, Maine, Maryland and Washington, it triumphed, for the first time ever. There was a ballot in Massachusetts in favour of ‘assisted...
Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland had an article in The Irish Times on Friday called ‘Myths about atheism obscure its secular values’. It was a highly sanitised presentation of atheism, what we might call ‘butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth’ atheism. Reading Michael, it is as though atheism has no history, that it emerged new...
