China’s population is expected to decline this year, more than a decade earlier than initially forecast, according to a government-backed scholar.

The number of people aged 65 and older surpassed 14 per cent of the total in 2021, making China an “aged” society, rather than an “ageing” one, Zheng Bingwen, director of international social security studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said.

“The adverse impact of ageing is the slowdown in economic growth,” he told a finance conference in Beijing. “Ageing will lead to declines in savings, which in turn lead to falls in investment, which will be a huge thing in China.”

A leading Professor of Psychiatry has said that the Catholic Church cannot be blamed for the largest institutions in Ireland used by communities to lock people away from society.

Brendan Kelly of Trinity College Dublin has just published a new book, ‘In Search of Madness: A Psychiatrist’s Travels Through the History of Mental Illness’.

Speaking to Ryan Tubridy on RTE Radio 1, he said in the 1800s, large mental asylums were built all over the world and societies and communities used these institutions to fill them with people with mental illness, with the intellectually disabled, or with those who were simply odd or eccentric. Ireland was no different in that respect where, he said, “we used so many institutions, mother and baby homes, industrial schools, Magdalen laundries”.

However, he added: “but interestingly, the Roman Catholic Church did not run our mental hospitals which were the biggest institutions of all of these, by a very long chalk. So the usual, the current narrative in Irish history, which is that we blame the Roman Catholic Church, and indeed it is blameworthy in many respects, but we don’t have that for the largest institutions in our history, which were the mental hospitals”.

He also commented on the programs of sterilisations that were introduced in some European countries in the 1930s for those in mental asylums. Such programmes existed in Scandinavia and in Germany in 1939, he said it escalated to a program of killing people with mental illness and neurological disorders.

He added: “This was consistent with eugenics, which was a movement in psychiatry at the time, but not interestingly in Ireland. The idea of eugenics didn’t particularly catch on among the Irish asylum doctors”. He did not elaborate as to why but the Catholic Church was consistently opposed to eugenics.

Two “British experts in domestic and international surrogacy” appeared before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on International Surrogacy on Wednesday to advocate against a ban on commercial surrogacy.

She told the committee it is “naive to paint domestic or altruistic surrogacy as wholly desirable and international or commercial surrogacy as wholly undesirable. There are no such bright lines”.

She added. “In truth there are a range of approaches to surrogacy involving good and bad practice everywhere. A far more useful question is what makes surrogacy ethical and how to promote it.”

Fine Gael senator, Mary Seery Kearney, who had her own child through a surrogacy arrangement in India, said that “There is an idea that Irish women are able to make fully informed decisions, and be supported in making those decisions, to become surrogates. But somehow, women in other jurisdictions are not able to do that either because of the country that they’re in, their socio-economic background, or different cultural dimensions? The idea that they are somehow not able to make informed decisions is, I think, borderline racism”.

The number of maternity units providing abortions will rise from ten to 14 out of a total of 19 by the end of the year, Stephen Donnelly, the Minister for Health, has said.

Ahead of the findings of a review of the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, a spokesman for Donnelly said that after engagement with Department of Health officials, one further hospital had joined the ten that already perform terminations. Three more had indicated they would do so by the end of the year.

Donnelly has asked the remaining five hospitals — Cavan, Wexford, South Tipperary, Letterkenny and Portlaoise — to outline their plans to offer abortions.

Launching the review of the law in December, Donnelly said he did not believe the government had achieved the geographical coverage and ‘ease of access’ to abortion that was required. More than 13,000 abortions have taken place in Ireland in 2019 and 2020 alone according to official figures.

Private fertility clinics are charging up to €450 for blood tests that some couples can get from their GP for a fraction of the cost.

It comes as two leading Irish fertility doctors warned IVF clinics have become “commercialised,” and are charging couples for expensive “add-on” treatments which claim to improve a couple’s chances of getting pregnant but are not supported by evidence.

A fertility consultant told the Irish Independent couples are spending hundreds of euro on treatments that he doesn’t believe will work. Meanwhile a former staff member said she had to leave a separate clinic after being made to feel she was “selling” IVF.

A proposal to make surrogacy a universal crime was deposited at the Italian Courts (Cassazione) on Monday.

In collaboration with the party LEGA and its secretary, Matteo Salvini, CitizenGO Italy was one of the first signatories of the proposal.

In a social media posting, a spokesperson said they will now begin a “citizen awareness campaign to get to the parliamentary debate”.

“After months of work, this event is the beginning of a path that will help us to eradicate the aberrant practice of surrogacy. After Spain, we want Italy too to enforce the right of women not to be commodified and the right of every child not to be sold as a common object”, the spokesperson added.

A national provider of housing and homeless services has paid tribute to the role religious congregations have played in helping to house the homeless and refugees from Ukraine.

Sophia founder Sr Jean Quinn said it had supported hundreds of people, including families and “this could not have been achieved without the vision and courage of the religious congregations”.

The religious congregations had also “been to forefront in the response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis by making the property they have available to house families fleeing the terror of war”, she said.

Since its foundation in 1997, ‘Sophia’ has acted as a conduit for religious congregations in addressing homelessness by making their lands and property available for homes.

Sophia’s 24-hours-a-day service in Dublin was recognised in 2019 as an example of European Best Practice in the European-funded project, Dignity and Well-Being. In Dublin it also has a project on Seán McDermott St.

Across Ireland Sophia owns or manages 365 homes and supports 1,034 people in their own homes. It focuses exclusively on helping people to leave homelessness by having a home of their own. It does not have hostels, shelters or family hubs etc, as it believes the solution to homelessness is not about providing a bed for the night but that people should have a home.

Dublin’s Catholic Archdiocese has offered its former seminary at Clonliffe College in Drumcondra for the accommodation of Ukrainian refugees.

It is estimated the facility could hold up to 620 people. A spokesman told The Irish Times that preparatory work would be necessary which could take some weeks.

Separately, parishes across the country have raised more than €3.25 million in collections in aid of Ukraine. Most of it was raised in a single weekend in late March.

Speaking on Morning Ireland on Friday, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh said former retreat centres and other religious buildings would also be made available to provide accommodation, with “30 to 40” religious congregations offering rooms.

In some cases the buildings “may need a bit of work” but that people had been offering their services. It also might not be appropriate for shared accommodation to be offered in parochial houses, but in some circumstances priests had moved out to share with other clergy to make accommodation available.

Significant restrictions on drinking during Holy Week in Northern Ireland have been lifted.

Changes to the licensing laws meant pubs and bars could open as normal this Easter after decades of limitations.

Previously on Good Friday, alcohol was only able to be served between 5pm and 11pm in Northern Ireland.

Licensed premises also had to stop serving at midnight on Easter Thursday and Holy Saturday.

The ban on Good Friday pub openings in the Republic lifted in 2018.

Those curbs were lifted by the Licensing and Registration of Clubs Act passed in the Stormont Assembly last year.

While some churches have expressed concern at the move, it has been broadly welcomed by pubs and clubs.

After almost a decade of death and destruction, and one year after the historic visit of Pope Francis to Iraq, more than 25,000 Assyrian Christians in Qaraqosh, on the Nineveh Plains of Northern Iraq, gathered to celebrate Holy Week. Nineveh is mentioned in the Old Testament and has one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

The majority-Christian Assyrian town is less than 20 miles southeast of Mosul, the city that in 2014 was the de facto capital of the Islamic State (ISIS) in the region.

Two decades ago, the towns of the Nineveh Plains were the home of approximately 1.5 million Christians in northern Iraq. After the second U.S. invasion in 2004 and the ISIS uprising in 2014, only about 300,000 Christians remained.

But on Palm Sunday, April 10, the town became the Christian epicenter of Iraq during a procession and a Mass presided by His Beatitude Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Yonan and Patriarch of Antioch and all the East for the Syriac Catholic Church.