The topic of this year’s Merriman Summer School in Co Clare is ‘Changing Irish Childhoods’. It ends on Sunday. So far it has been addressed by such people as Children’s Minister, Frances Fitzgerald (pictured), Norah Gibbons of Bernardos, and Mary O’Rourke. To judge from the reports of their speeches in The Irish Times, one very...
David Cameron was the most prominent figure who suggested that fatherlessness and general moral breakdown were behind last week’s riots, but he wasn’t on his own. David Lammy (pictured), The Labour MP for the Tottenham area, where the riots started said that the lack of male role models in young men’s lives was one of...
Monday’s speech by Prime Minister David Cameron used some of the strongest language heard from any politician anywhere in Britain or Ireland in a very long time to describe the extent of the moral collapse which led to the anarchy and looting in British cities last week. Mr Cameron spoke of “people showing indifference to...
A growing GDP is generally considered to be a very healthy and desirable thing for a country, but in fact as a measure of economic, much less social well-being, it is a very blunt instrument which for one thing ill-serves the family. Here is a useful article by Robert W. Patterson of the Family in...
The looting and arson in Britain have many causes, but who can seriously doubt that one of the causes is the collapse of traditional morality and the traditional family in large parts of Britain. Notably, Indians were not among the rioters. Why not? Almost certainly the chief reason is that they have not destroyed their...
Many factors are to blame for the riots in London and other English cities. One of them has to be the absence of a father-figure from the lives of so many of the rioters. There is a well established link between father-absence and juvenile delinquency. In her blog, British commentator, Christine Odone, makes the same...
Kay Hymowitz has a useful piece in the US website, City Journal explaining the phenomenon of the gap in income between men and women. Hymowitz acknowledges that the gap exists, but rejects the notion that it is because of policy failures on the part of government. Instead, she says that the main driver of the...
Some months ago Robert P George, Ryan T Anderson and Sherif Girgis wrote one of the best papers to date on the same-sex marriage issue. That paper has prompted an ongoing debate with various advocates of same-sex marriage critiquing it and the paper’s authors, chiefly Girgis responding. One of the most recent attacks on the...
Last week the Law Reform Commission (LRC) published a report, Children and the Law: Medical Treatment, which said that teens as young as 16, and in some cases younger, should be able to access contraception without their parents approving or even knowing. This is in spite of the fact that age of legal consent for...
Those who argue against same-sex marriage sometimes argue that to legalise it would be to fundamentally redefine marriage. Legalise same-sex marriage, they argue, and you may as well legalise polygamy. If marriage shouldn’t be confined to a man and a woman, why should it be confined to just two people? Why not one man and...
