The “Religious Freedom in the World 2018” report, newly launched by Aid to the Church in Need, lists grave violations of religious freedom in 38 countries and the situation is clearly worsening. This report assesses the religious situation of 196 countries in the world, looking at legislation, incidents of note, and at a projection of...

Last week’s RTE programme about the gender gap in Ireland claimed to offer ‘the big picture’ about the reality of Irish women’s lives today. It certainly failed to do that. The women selected were atypical in terms of their chosen professions and life situations. The scrolling flow of statistics across the screen also failed to...

The Government is funnelling significant funding to creche facilities, with the hope that more mothers will enter the workforce. The policy ignores the fact that many parents don’t want to put their children into day-care and it also ignores a new study which shows that subsidising day-care might not have much impact on parental choices....

The Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Bill 2018 is set to return to the Dáil for Report Stage debate next week. We can be almost certain that before, during and after this debate, the onslaught of deliberate misrepresentations around the 16 ‘pro-life’ amendments will continue apace. Much of the commentary surrounding those amendments has...

Despite the wish of some atheists, the religious instinct of human beings is basically ineradicable. When it doesn’t find a direct religious outlet, it will find other outlets, such as politics. By ‘the religious instinct’ I mean the wish to find meaning and purpose in life, something bigger than ourselves, transcendence, a belief in a...

Last week the Oireachtas Select Committee on Health met to discuss over 180 amendments to the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Bill 2018. One of the amendments centred on inserting a requirement on the part of the medical practitioner to perform an ultrasound of the pregnant women and subsequently offering her the choice of...

Minister Simon Harris and the Health Committee have rejected an amendment to the abortion Bill that would have allowed for a dignified disposal of the bodily remains of aborted foetuses. The rationale of the amendment is to assure that human remains are not treated as clinical waste and sent (for example) to an incinerator, as...

Does Simon Harris properly understand the abortion law he is championing? The evidence mounts that he does not. For example, at the hearings of the Health Committee yesterday he rejected an amendment to his law that would explicitly ban abortion on grounds such as sex or disability. As reported in the Examiner, he believes the...

If there is no real basis for thinking there are natural differences between the sexes, then it should be the case that in more equal societies the apparent differences disappear. We should expect that men and women will come to do much the same kind of work, and develop the same kinds of traits. Actually,...

By Patrick Fitzgerald Now that the dust has settled after the referendum, the main question on the minds of prolife people is: where to from here? How do we respond to the result and build a new prolife generation? An important task is understanding the most compelling pro-choice arguments and framing a cogent and coherent...