Children’s rights organisations plus a number of politicians have reacted to the publication of the Roscommon Child Care Case report by calling for a children’s rights referendum. For example, in a statement the Children Right’s Alliance said: “The Constitution currently does not grant individual rights to children, within marital families. It is clear that constitutional...
In the run-up to the 2007 General Election The Irish Catholic sent a questionnaire to the various political parties asking them for their position on various social issues including the family and the right to life. Last week I did a follow-up piece for The Irish Catholic and I compared what the two main parties promised...
Earlier this week the Oireachtas Committee on Social Protection issued a report called ‘Financial Disincentives to Marriage and Cohabitation’. On the plus side, the report admits that children raised by lone parents often face bigger problems than those raised by two parents. On the negative side, it refuses to recognise that marriage is generally better...
The other day I was on the Joe Nash radio show on Limerick Today. Under discussion were new figures showing that in the first quarter of this year, a massive 62 percent of children in Limerick were born outside marriage. The national average is around one in three, and that is high in itself. Cork...
Last week’s vote in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in favour of religious freedom was a welcome boost for those concerned about freedom of speech and conscience. In the past number of years, such victories have been all too rare. Under consideration was the McCafferty report which proposed to force health-care...
There was an excellent article in The Irish Independent magazine on Saturday that dealt with the trials and tribulations of conceiving children through the use of donor-sperm. There are more ethical problems attaching to this than you can shake a stick at and Breda O’Brien wrote a paper for us on some of those problems...
The new Conservative government in the UK has landed itself in hot water over its plan to cut child benefit payments to what it describes as “higher earners”. And while the Government here is focused on cutting non-essential spending here, it might learn some useful lessons on what not to do from the approach taken...
The international media has been full of stories about the granting of the Nobel Prize to Dr Robert Edwards, one of the scientists behind the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). But there are a couple of dirty little secrets about IVF which all the happy media stories don’t reveal. The treatment is controversial for...
A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life generated a lot of headlines by showing that, although Americans are more religious than most people in the developed world, they also appear to be relatively ignorant about religion. Pew asked 3,400 American 32 questions about religion and religious issues, and most could...
The subject of our conference last Friday becomes more relevant with each passing day. A report is currently before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) calling on member-states of the Council to ‘regulate’ conscientious objection so as to ensure that women seeking procedures such as abortion are not denied their ‘right’ as...
