Elizabeth Marquardt, writing on the Family Scholars Blog, mentions an article in the Wall Street entitled “The Child Focused Divorce” in which a couple agree that they “wanted to minimize the damage the split would do to their daughters”. This all sounds very fine, but as Elizabeth (whose mother divorced twice when Elizabeth was young)...
The Minister for Justice Alan Shatter (pictured) yesterday said the row over proposals to break the seal of confession is “an entirely bogus issue”. With respect to the Minister, it is not. How can it be when Mr Shatter himself, as well as Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Minister for Children, Frances Fitzgerald, have all insisted...
In my column this week in The Irish Independent I write about the seal of confession issue and the proposal by the Government to require by law that it be breached when a confession of child abuse is heard. As I point out in the column, laws of this sort are extremely rare and historically...
Today’s criticism by The Irish Times of Cardinal Sean Brady’s defence of the seal of confession is puzzling to say the least. Cardinal Brady described Government proposals which would require Catholic priests to break the seal where child abuse is confessed as an attack on religious freedom. He said that the inviolability of the seal...
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s (pictured) has written about the London riots and to judge from a headline The Guardian put on his analysis you could be forgiven for thinking Blair rejected David Cameron’s “broken society” rhetoric in its entirety. It’s true that Blair seemed to reject suggestions that there was an overall moral crisis,...
Recently I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the first time. I was reminded of it the other day when reading about a sex education kit being handed out to young children in Switzerland. In Brave New World, the children who are ‘decanted’ in baby factories are raised by the State, not parents, and...
The cover story of The Economist last week was called ‘Asia’s lonely hearts: Why Asian women are rejecting marriage and what that means’. The picture on the front was of a lovelorn Asian man, rose in hand, and a woman striding purposefully away from him. The story was really about East Asian women. It told...
One of Britain’s most acute and insightful thinkers today is Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (pictured). Dr Sacks has written about the UK looting and arson for a number of publications, including in this article from the Wall Street Journal. In it he makes the point that the West has been spending its moral capital as fast...
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...
