The Children’s Rights Alliance has issued its 2009 Report Card. It’s entitled ‘Is the Government keeping its promises to children?’ It is divided into four sections: education; material wellbeing; health and safeguarding childhood. It gives the Government an overall grade of D. Its lowest mark is for health and its highest mark is for safeguarding...
Major survey of attitudes to Assisted Human Reproduction
A clear majority of public opinion in the West favours the use of assisted human reproduction (AHR) in certain circumstances, according to a major survey carried out last year. The study asked 1,500 adults in 15 countries, including Ireland, about their views on IVF and other AHR techniques. It found that most people favoured its...
Yet another horrendous abuse case has come to public attention, this one involving the abuse and neglect of six children by their mother. The family first came to the attention of the relevant health board in 1989. It wasn’t until 2000 that an attempt was made to remove the children from the mother’s care. Why...
Children’s charities insist that we need a children’s rights referendum in order to better enable the State to protect children. They claim the Irish Constitution too strongly favours parents over children, although as Justice Adrian Hardiman correctly points out, it strongly favours parents over the State. Britain does not have a written constitution let alone...
Maggie Gallagher, writing on a US website, National Review, points out that there has been an uptick in the number of teen births in the last couple of years in that country. In short, she hasn’t got an answer for why, but she does comprehensively rebut the suggestion that abstinence programmes or religious objections to...
The very important remarks of SVP regional head Brendan Delaney on absent fathers again highlight the importance of children having both their mother and their father. Why are they absent? In some cases it is because the father wants nothing to do with his children. In other cases the mother doesn’t want him to have...
