Two major reports on the family have been issued in the last few days, one on attitudes to the family in Ireland, one on family structure in Ireland. The first shows that there is a lot of wishful thinking going on about the changes to family life that are taking place, the other confirms that...
Earlier this year, Labour Senator Ivana Bacik and her colleague in the Dáil, Labour TD Aodhan O Riordán proposed ending the prayers said in the Oireachtas before each session, supposedly to promote greater “pluralism”. Both Senator Bacik and Mr O’Riordán placed this issue on the agenda of the Committee on Procedure and Privileges (CPP) in...
Family law scholar Helen Alvare, an associate professor at George Mason University, has written a thoughtful two part series for the Witherspoon Institute’s blog, Public Discourse, on how family law has evolved over the decades from being child and marriage-centred to being freedom and adult-centred. This trend is very much present in Irish law as...
Last month the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Canada rejected an attempt by breakaway Mormons to recognise polygamous marriage. Pressure is growing across the Western world to no longer restrict marriage to one man and one woman. The biggest and most successful source of that pressure is the gay rights movement, but increasingly Muslims...
The Family Scholars’ blog, which carries a range of stories and opinion items on contemporary family issues recently carried a post by an author calling himself Rnewman and bemoaning the attitude of his fellow countryfolk to marriage and the family. He points out the irony of a country where state supports for the family are...
During the riots that engulfed parts of Britain last summer, one figure stood out for the clarity of his analysis and the credibility of his witness, namely Labour MP, David Lammy (pictured). Lammy was raised in Tottenham, one of the worst hit areas, and from the age of 12 was raised by his mother alone,...
The Irish Times has been running a series of articles focusing on some of the issues surrounding Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR). These include the issues of surrogacy, conception involving donor sperm or eggs and the treatment of embryos which result from IVF. One of the notable features of this series is that it has looked...
Americans see religion as more important, and more important for morality, than Western Europeans, according to a new poll carried out by the Pew Research Centre. The poll, published yesterday, 50pc of Americans deem religion very important in their lives. From the European side, the survey looked at Spain, Germany, France and the UK but...
Since writing a blog earlier in the week about a recent episode of Glee someone has brought to my attention the musings of Ian Brennan, the co-creator of Glee on being a Catholic. Incredibly, Glee was given an award by a Catholic group in the US. The decision was so incredible that Brennan himself was...
We are frequently told that, for Ireland to be truly “modern” and “pluralist”, it must remove the reference to God in the preamble to the Constitution. In fact, it is commonplace for European countries to include a reference to God in their constitutions or the preambles to their constitutions. Our own preamble reads: “In the...
