If your parents are divorced there is less chance that you will be religious. That is the finding of a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute. In other words, a high divorce rate is driving down religious belief. The US poll (which deals with drivers of irreligion generally) finds that if your parents divorced...

I had a very interesting debate about childcare on RTE’s Today with Sean O’Rourke yesterday. I was debating ex-Senator Jillian Van Turnhout, formerly of the Children’s Rights Alliance. I argued in favour of parental choice when it comes to child-minding. Jillian argued in favour of State-sponsored, State-funded, State-regulated ‘early education’. It was a clash of...

There is growing anecdotal evidence that couples in Irish hospitals are being pressured into having abortions after being informed that their babies suffer from a serious disability. This is eugenics, and it violates both the right to life and, paradoxically, the right to choose. In his column in The Irish Catholic this week, David Quinn...

Here in Ireland, there is a strong campaign against faith schools. Their ethos is under attack for not being ‘inclusive’ enough, as is their admissions policy. Meanwhile, the British Government has just heaped praise on Catholic schools and said more are to be built in order to meet public demand. The contrast with the situation...

To what extent is belief in the right to life of unborn children a religious belief? That, in essence, is the question posed by Laura Kennedy, a columnist with The Irish Times. Her own answer is, it’s very much a religious belief. Kennedy wrote along these lines in The Irish Times a few months ago...

Master of the National Maternity Hospital, Dr Rhona Mahony performed well as usual when she was on TV last night, specifically Claire Byrne Live on RTE 1. She is for repeal of the 8th Amendment. Given her job, many members of the public are likely to have been swayed by her. But really we need...

A new opinion poll from the US lists some of the reasons why people abandon ‘organised religion’. These are the so-called ‘nones’, as in “my religion is ‘none’”. If a similar poll was done here, the reasons given for abandoning religion would be similar I am sure. The reasons range from the hypocrisy of some...

At the Rose of Tralee contest last week, Sydney Rose, Brianna Parkins, called for a referendum on abortion and then appeared on Twitter wearing a ‘Repeal the 8th’ T-shirt. David Quinn of The Iona Institute appeared on the Pat Kenny Show and the Last Word on Friday to argue that light entertainment shows like the...

Politics is unavoidably a clash of values. We see this in the decision by some French municipalities to stop Muslim women wearing the body-covering ‘burkini’ to the beach. Should Muslim women be free to wear the burkini, or is wearing it inherently oppressive? Is France protecting itself against ‘excessive multi-culturalism’, or is the ban an...

Larry Siedentop is a secular liberal but unlike many secular liberals he has a benign view of Christianity and its influence on Western culture. In fact, he is willing to point out that Western liberalism and its very strong emphasis on individual freedom and equality ultimately finds its origins in Christianity. To this end, Siedentop,...