Writing in The Irish Times yesterday, law lecturer Ronan McCrea argued that immigrant laws must give preference to people who are committed to ‘tolerance’. Depending on what he means, this could be deeply problematic, or not. If he has in mind immigrants who would impose Sharia law on their new societies given a chance, then...
Study after study has been produced showing the negative effects of divorce on children. But even when the children of divorce manage to keep up their school grades and so on, divorce can still affect them in ways that are not directly measurable. I came across a very relevant quote on this point the other...
At our conference on Women, Home and Work a fortnight ago, speaker Jonas Himmelstrand said the Swedish day-care model should not be followed by other countries because it is failing both children and parents in his country. An article in The Irish Times yesterday defended the ‘Nordic Model’ without really addressing the arguments against it....
As mentioned in my previous blog on the topic, at the recent Iona Institute conference, I was shocked by some of Jonas Himmelstrand’s descriptions of family policy in Sweden. As I understood, it aimed, among other things, to “liberate mothers from motherhood instincts,” so they could continue their careers. My own career would indeed be...
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...
