How can the promotion of marriage help reverse economic and social inequality in Irish society? This was a topic broached in the Iona Institute’s Mind the Gap briefing note which showed that marriage and family differ hugely by social class, with the best-off far more likely to marry and reap its benefits than the worst off. That same...
New technologies are changing the nature of medicine from a form of therapy aimed at restoring health to a kind of perfectionism aimed at individual enhancement. Speaking at the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford, Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, said that the classical understanding of medicine was summed up by the Latin phrase...
Would a ban on surrogacy in Ireland be futile because people would simply travel abroad for it instead? This seems to be the argument of UCG law lecturer, Haley Mulligan, in a letter to the Irish Times. She was responding to Jennifer Lahl who addressed an Iona Institute meeting on surrogacy last week and called for...
Iona Institute spokeswoman, Maria Steen, was on ‘The Cutting Edge’ last night. Among the topics discussed; raising children, sex education, attitudes towards religion, and the gender pay gap. The other panellists were radio presenter, Sean Moncrieff, and comedian, Deirdre O’Kane. The show is presented by Brendan O’Connor. You can watch the item by clicking here.
The case favouring public daycare at the expense of homecare is based on the contention that children fare better, both educationally and otherwise, in settings under the care and supervision of trained educationalists. This is certainly what Children’s Minister, Katherine Zappone, would have us believe. However, Dr Catherine Hakim, British social scientist and herself a feminist,...
This week, The Iona Institute hosted Jennifer Lahl (pictured) of ‘Stop Surrogacy Now‘, and the Centre for Bioethics and Culture in California. ‘Stop Surrogacy Now’ aims to bring a halt to all forms of surrogacy on the grounds that it exploits women and commodifies children. It is a broad-based coalition involving feminists, conservatives, religious and...
It seems family structure matters after all. An important new paper from the ESRI devotes a chapter to this question, and after controlling for factors like poverty, it nonetheless finds that being raised in a two parent household as distinct from a one parent household can confer certain advantages on children. The paper is called...
The Irish State seems to have a “deep seated aversion” to the unborn child. Who said that? It might surprise you that it was not a pro-life activist, but rather High Court judge and former Labour party councillor, Richard Humphreys. In July, he delivered a judgement that the unborn child enjoys more rights and protections...
The Irish Times has carried yet another article calling for an end to publicly-funded denominational education. It argues that Ireland should copy Quebec if it wants to end its “patronage problem”. Through an Act of Parliament, highly secular Quebec basically brought a shuddering halt to public funding of denominational schools 16 years ago. The article,...
“Budget 2017 discriminates against every parent of young children who does not use day care. That might mean you. Contrary to what you often read, only a minority of parents put their children into day care and only a minority want to. But the child-care plans outlined in this week’s Budget are aimed exclusively at...
