So, the government have won their surrogacy case in the Supreme Court. Birth mothers will remain legal mothers for the moment and will have their names recorded on the birth cert, but the Oireachtas will basically have the power to define the term, “motherhood” as the court rejected the State’s argument that the legal principle mater semper certa est or...
November 4th is a big day. Alongside Congressional elections, it hosts the Colorado Definition of Person and Child Initiative (“Amendment 67”), an initiated constitutional amendment. If approved by voters, the measure would include unborn human beings under the definition of “person” and “child” in the Colorado criminal code. Amendment 67 was initiated by Heather Surovik,...
Finance Minister Michael Noonan recently said that reforming the tax code to make it less unfair to single-earner married couples and to take more account of dependent children was simply not on the cards. Once a fierce opponent of Charlie McCreevey’s tax individualisation policy, on the post-budget Sean O’Rourke programme he went to bat for...
Iona Institute director David Quinn was on Newstalk’s Pat Kenny show debating assisted suicide with Tom Curran, partner of the late Marie Fleming. Curran is supporting a bill sponsored by Independent TD John Halligan which would legislate for assisted suicide based on the model adopted by the US State of Oregon. He said that when...
There is a big push on to get the Government to pay for additional free ‘pre-school’ places when finances allow. There are two big arguments in favour of this. One is that it benefits children educationally, the other is that will help more women into the workplace. Two new studies from the UK call both...
The debate over same-sex marriage could be summed up as a debate between those who think it will redefine the institution in a way that will undermine the rights of children, and those who think it will merely expand it. Many same-sex marriage supporters argue that nothing about the character of the institution will change,...
A while ago, a large study came out which indicated, among other things, that having a big wedding was correlated with having a happier marriage with less chance of divorce. At Iona, we wondered at the time if it was splashing out that really made the difference, or was it the number of guests? Well,...
Look at any futuristic movie – say Star Trek or Blade Runner – and you find one reliable consistency: massive cities, packed with Frank Lloyd Wright-esque mile-high skyscrapers. Why? Why would we need such density of building? Ironically, the neon-lit, congested, sky-less street scenes in Blade Runner are straight from Tokyo. Or. at least, Tokyo...
The straw man is an all-too-common feature of contentious debates. On one level, this is understandable: why engage with your opponent’s actual argument when you can create another, weaker version of it which can be easily defeated or dismissed? The problem, of course, is that you never actually get anywhere: neither side understands the other,...
The tragic case of Dhara Kivlehan, who died of organ failure several days after giving birth by Caesarian section, is the latest in a number of cases where Irish hospitals disastrously failed pregnant women, many of them non-nationals. But there’s something strange about the degree to which the Irish media seem to cover each of...
