On May 26, The Iona Institute is hosting a conference called ‘Women, home and work: towards a policy that’s fair to all families’. One of the speakers will be Jonas Himmelstrand of The Mireja Institute in Sweden who will speak about family policy in Sweden, especially its much lauded childcare system. Jonas was recently in...
Today’s Irish Times has a revealing feature on the difficulties faced by adopted children try to find their birth parents. The piece speaks of the “huge emotional turmoil” experienced by both the adoptee and their birth parents. Underlying the piece is the assumption that adopted children ought to have the right to access information about...
Could the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton next week give the institution of marriage in the UK a boost? One prominent family policy expert certainly hopes so. Jill Kirby, chair of the Family Policy Group at the Centre for Policy Studies, suggests in this piece in the Daily Telegraph that marriage there could...
Since coming to office in February, Education Minister Ruairi Quinn has certainly been forthright in advancing a secular education agenda. His call for the transfer of “at least half” of all Catholic primary schools to alternative patronage caused waves, but his suggestion that the teaching of the sacraments took up too much school time was...
The latest Eurostat figures again demonstrate that the continent’s demographics are headed off a cliff. According to the latest figures, there has been a slight improvement in the overall total fertility rate (TFR), from 1.47 per woman of childbearing age to 1.6, since 2003. However, this is still far below the replacement level, which requires...
Writing in the current issue of ‘InTouch’, the magazine of the INTO, Fionnaula Ward, Primary Education Officer of Educate Together wonders how to go about teaching atheism in Educate Together schools. She acknowledges the potential difficulties while obviously hoping they can be overcome. She points out that Educate Together schools currently try to acquaint pupils...
The new Catholic Schools Partnership (CSP) has just issued a very good and timely position paper called ‘Catholic schools in the Republic of Ireland’. It is timely because of the forum on school patronage established by Ruairi Quinn. Minister Quinn caused quite a stir last month when he said he would like to see around...
Richard Waghorne (pictured), writing in today’s Irish Daily Mail, explains that, although he is himself gay, he doesn’t believe that same-sex marriage is a good idea. His reason for this is simple: Marriage receives special status because the protection it gives to children, not because of the status it gives to adults: “The support and status...
One of the big accusations aimed at denominational schools is that they are ‘exclusive’ whereas their secular counterparts are ‘inclusive’. However, this is a caricature. Denominational schools obviously have a denominational ethos, and they are there to serve their own religious community first and foremost. But this does not on its own mean children from...
Yesterday’s statement by Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn that he is looking to transfer the patronage of 50 per cent of Irish primary schools from the Church to some other patronage body appears to have caused some concern to members of the hierarchy. It is not the fact of some schools being given up that...
