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...
ITV aired a remake over the last three weeks of the (for its time) shocking 1976 TV series, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire. The character around whom all the action centres is Prue, the university-age daughter of Peter who is unhealthily obsessed with her. Prue becomes pregnant and marries Gavin, much to the fury of...
One of the aims of The Iona Institute is to highlight, and to do what we can to counter the rise of aggressive secularism and the consequent and growing threat to freedom of religion and conscience. Since our launch in January 2007 we have continually drawn attention to what is happening in this regard both...
Here are a few more thoughts on that sex, sin and society poll in The Irish Times. Yesterday the paper ran part two of the poll and one question asked respondents to rank in order of personal disapproval eleven types of behaviour that all the major religions regard as sinful. Number one was ‘lying under...
Yesterday The Irish Times published the results of a poll that show we are becoming ever more liberal in our attitudes towards sex and relationships. The results, which aren’t a bit surprising, will be greeted with much self-adulation by liberals because they mean we are becoming more tolerant. This is true. A society that places...
