At the Iona Institute’s family policy conference late last month, we heard Jonas Himmelstrand’s sometimes jaw-dropping description of Swedish family policy. It was interesting to hear, on the one hand, how government policy and media so strongly promote the Swedish model of full-time daycare and full employment for parents as early as the child’s second...
Here is a research brief produced by US think-tank, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (iMAPP) on the 10th anniversary of same-sex marriage in the Netherlands and the overall state of marriage there. It provides some food for thought on the possible impact of legalising same-sex marriage on the institution of marriage generally. There...
As you may have read, a Canadian couple is not telling the world the sex of their baby. To do so, they believe, would impose all kinds of stereotypes about boys and girls on the child. Therefore they won’t tell anyone if he/she is a boy or a girl so he/she can be free to...
I have recently finished reading Victoria White’s book Mother Ireland – why Ireland hates motherhood (which was referred to at the Institute’s conference last week on Women, Home and Work). One point that the author makes is that many of the founding mothers of Irish feminism had very bad experiences of husbands or fathers, and...
In today’s Irish Times Breda O’Brien summarises proceedings at our conference this week on women, home and work concentrating in particular on what Jonas Himmelstrand had to say about day-care in Sweden.Breda writes: “Scandinavia, and particularly Sweden, is regularly presented as a kind of social Utopia, especially for women. A headline from May 7th last...
Labour leader Ed Miliband (pictured) is set to marry on Friday, but it seems he doesn’t want it to be an advert for the institution of marriage. Instead, he told the BBC that marriage does not ‘automatically’ make families more stable. He’s right about that, but on average marriage is much stable than cohabitation and...
Fr Micheál Mac Gréil’s new book, ‘Pluralism and Diversity in Ireland’, has some interesting findings as regards religious practice in Ireland. Perhaps one of the most interesting points he makes is that only 38.7pc of of Catholics who report having completed secondary schooling attend weekly Mass as against 62.2pc of those who went to a...
Secular liberal commentators often point to Sweden as a country where their ideal of an equitable, modern, secular and tolerant country actually works. However, the flip side of Sweden’s hyper-egalitarianism is that the State has made Swedish families extremely subservient to it. And a recent case has highlighted just how illiberal this intervention can be....
Karen Kiernan, the director of One Family, a single parent support group, had a letter in yesterday’s Irish Times, praising an article in that paper on the “love and determination shown by President Obama’s single mother”. She wrote: “It is so rare to read positive stories about the achievements of single parents and the success...
In a recent article posted on the Public Discourse website, Christopher Wolfe, emeritus professor of political science at Marquette University, draws an interesting analogy between marriage as a social institution and private property as a social institution. In his article, entitled The Abolition of Marriage, he suggests that, despite the fact that people are naturally...
