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...
Earlier this week, British Prime Minister David Cameron was attacked by the Centre for Social Justice over his failure to support marriage and the family since coming into office a year ago. The irony is that the CSJ was founded by one of his own Ministers, Iain Duncan Smith. Gavin Poole, the centre’s chief executive,...
I didn’t spot this story at the time, but it is absolutely extraordinary. As we know, some pharmacists object to selling the so-called morning-after-pill because it can act as an abortifacient. In some countries the law forces them to sell it come-what-may. But in Berlin recently, a pharmacy had its windows smashed because of the...
MP Nadine Dorries has bravely proposed a new law requiring that schools teaching abstinence education to girls aged 13-16. I say brave, because there is something about the word ‘abstinence’ that makes some people break out in spots. She would have been better off using a term like ‘sexual delay’. I was on the breakfast...
