There has been much debate in the last few weeks about the ‘compulsory’ nature of the Government’s Public Services Card. Many of those concerns revolve around increased levels of State intrusion and the threat to personal privacy. This is a threat also posed to an increasing extent in the medical world as knowledge of genetics...
There is an intense debate raging within Neonatal medicine in the United States and elsewhere about whether or not very premature babies (22-26 weeks gestation) are full members of the human family. The claim that they are not, clears the path to allowing these babies to die rather than save them. This is the extension...
When Taoiseach Leo Varadkar met his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau in Montreal this week, Trudeau presumed to lecture Varadkar on Ireland’s abortion law. There was no evidence of pushback from our Taoiseach despite the fact that in Canada there is no law preventing abortion taking place for any reason right up to birth. Trudeau said:...
Some pro-life groups show pictures of aborted foetuses in public. I will try to address three questions: Is this legal? Is it appropriate? Is it effective? First of all, we need to clarify that the Director of Public Prosecutions has confirmed in a letter that showing the reality of abortion is not illegal under the...
Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent, Patsy McGarry, wrote an article last week urging the broadest use of the new techniques available in genome editing that aim to decrease the likelihood of children being born with serious genetic defects. The problem with this process is that it involves a form of experimentation on embryos which destroys...
In the last couple of weeks, we have had two big examples of people being sacked for violating the tenets of ‘diversity’. One was Sunday Times columnist, Kevin Myers, who was sacked on a charge of ‘anti-Semitism’. Myers is far from being an anti-Semite but he did write a sentence in his column that could...
Is it too much to ask pro-choice activists to refrain from violating holy places? Can we ask them to avoid profanity and sacrilegious language with the purpose of causing offense to religious believers, especially Catholics? Can we ask them not to misuse religious iconography? There are growing indications that some pro-choice activists don’t want to...
A billboard ad claiming that 100,000 lives have been saved because of Northern Ireland’s restrictive abortion regime was run in January. Complaints about its accuracy were made to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The good news is that the complaints have been rejected because the ASA believes the claim is reasonable and defensible. As you...
Paul Cullen recently wrote a long article for the Irish Times about the rights of children conceived artificially through the use of sperm or eggs from anonymous donors. This controversial method, called heterologous fertilisation, raises many moral and legal issues. To what extent does this practice infringe the identity rights of these ‘donor-children’? The Assisted...
New Census data shows that the married family continues its decline in Irish life. While it is still by the easily the predominant type of family overall, its dominance has declined with the rise of cohabiting couples, divorce and separation, and single-parent households. Yesterday, the CSO released the Households and Family data from Census 2016....
