The new Social Personal and Health Education (SPHE) programme for Junior Cycle pupils (aged 12-15) has been approved by the Minister for Education. It incorporates Relationships and Sexuality Education, but incredibly, the new curriculum specification never mentions pregnancy or babies, and ‘men’ and ‘women’ are treated as almost alien terms. Instead, the curriculum heavily emphasises...
Assisted suicide should be made available to the poor, the homeless and the disabled, two ethicists from the University of Toronto have argued, and a large number of Canadians agree with them. Once again, we see how quickly assisted suicide and euthanasia can become normalised in a country and be seen as an acceptable way...
The number of marriages that took place in 2022 saw a significant increase on 2021, but this was mainly due to the postponement of weddings during the Covid pandemic. Overall, the marriage rate in Ireland remains low compared with a few decades ago. In all, 23,173 marriages were registered last year, according to the Central...
The official review of Ireland’s abortion law, published last week, was exactly as bad as pro-life campaigners feared it would be. Its only aim is to make it even easier to access abortion. It shows no visible concern for the unborn child and no visible wish that abortion should be rare, which is what the...
Sexual abuse and harassment seem to be on the increase in Ireland, particularly among young women. This is also certainly contrary to the expectation that as Ireland becomes more ‘open’, ‘tolerant’ and ‘liberal’, levels of sexual abuse would decline. A new major survey by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has revealed that 21pc of women...
Women are not being made fully aware of the risks that can be associated with abortion pills, a conference organised by Bios Centre in Britain has been told. Over the phone consultation adds more danger to their use. The same applies here in Ireland where 133 “adverse incidents” related to abortion have been reported by...
When President Joe Biden addressed the Joint Houses of the Oireachtas yesterday, he mentioned the word ‘dignity’ no fewer than seven times, asking the assembled politicians to “Name me another country, in whatever their language is, that use the word ‘dignity’ as much as we Irish use the word ‘dignity’.” In fact, what he did...
The number of pregnancies ending in abortion in England and Wales reached a record high in 2021 of 26.5pc, according to a new report. In the case of married women, just 10.4pc of pregnancies ended in a termination, versus 35.8 pc among unmarried women, a difference of three and a half to one. Those figures...
Nineteenth-century liberalism sought to establish a regime where humanity would be freed from the restrictions of tradition, religion and social structures. That vision proposed the liberated individual as the supreme model and controller of personal destiny. It advanced the dream of a super-industrialised society that would facilitate that freedom so that all could be whatever...
Professor Richard Rex of Queens’ College, Cambridge, addressed The Iona Institute and the Notre Dame Newman Centre for Faith and Reason in University Church last Wednesday night (March 22). His topic was ‘Europe and the Faith’, borrowing the title from Hilaire Belloc’s book of the same name. Professor Rex discussed the past, present and future...
