Four Independent TDs have called for places of worship to be reopened for limited numbers of people for Easter.

Tipperary TD Mattie McGrath claimed “this Cabinet will go down in history as the most anti-Christian Government of all time since we got our freedom back . . . to think that people will be persecuted for going to Mass or having public worship”.

Mr McGrath pointed to a Scottish supreme court ruling on Wednesday that it was in breach to the European Convention on Human Rights to completely stop public worship. He said: “if it’s against Scotland’s European rights it’s against ours. I’m appealing especially for Holy Week” for religious services to be allowed.

He said a parish priest had contacted him about a note he saw on a window “where nine people can go into a chipper or takeaway and nobody allowed inside a church”.

Regarding to 10 person limit on funerals, Limerick TD Richard O’Donoghue said “140 people or more were in this room (Convention Centre) today voting on legislation. There’s churches in this country bigger than this and yet you only allow 10 people in.”

Minister of State for Health Anne Rabbitte was unable to point to any direct evidence justifying the ban on public worship.

Northern Ireland’s First Minister Arlene Foster has told Northern Secretary Brandon Lewis to “back off” in a row over the introduction of permissive abortion legislation. The law decriminalises abortion completely,

The DUP leader was reacting to Mr Lewis’s intervention in the House of Commons on Tuesday, where he said he was taking on the power to compel health minister Robin Swann to commission an extensive abortion regime in the North despite the Executive not agreeing on the issue.

At a press conference in Dungannon, Co Tyrone with Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill, Ms Foster said the DUP’s position was “that both lives matter, and whilst we’ve spent this past year trying to save lives through Covid-19, we should also try and save lives in the womb”.

“This is a hugely complex, controversial, legally challenging issue for the Executive but let us be very clear, it is for the Executive, it is not for Brandon Lewis,” added Ms Foster.

She said the new abortion law came in at Westminster in 2019 because devolution was suspended. “There is devolution now and he should back off,” she said of Mr Lewis.

Worshippers have returned to churches in Scotland after a judge ruled coronavirus regulations that forced their closure were unlawful.

Instead of a blanket ban, a limit of 50 people has been employed where churches are large enough to offer 2m social distancing.

St Mary’s Catholic Church in Calton in east Glasgow was among the churches to reopen yesterday, welcoming believers for midday Mass.

Canon Tom White was involved in the legal action and he said that he was “delighted” at the outcome.

He told the PA news agency: “I think it’s an important victory not so much dependent on your disposition towards how we keep each other safe in this time of pandemic, but it’s how we make sure that how we act as a liberal democracy is proportionate and that we don’t at all costs trample on the rights of others.

“Authentic worship is about gathering together as a community, authentic worship for us in the Catholic tradition is about coming together in a building which is sacred and participating in a sacred space at a sacred time and the sacraments necessarily are tangible, they’re not virtual. Faith is real, it’s tangible and people in this time of pandemic need to embrace the sacred.”

He said that his parishioners were “delighted” and “over the moon” at being able to take part in communal worship again.

Scotland’s churches can reopen immediately after Covid regulations that forced their closure and criminalised public worship were deemed a breach of human rights.

Lord Braid said the regulations disproportionately interfered with the freedom of religion secured in the European Convention on Human Rights. In striking down the blanket ban, the judge allowed the previous regulation to return, namely, a limit of up to 50 people if the place of worship is large enough to facilitate 2m social distancing.

In the ruling, the Judge said it was difficult to see why the Scottish courts services could use cinemas to conduct jury trials, but yet parishioners were prevented from going to church.

Measures such as social distancing and limiting numbers did not appear to have been considered and an instruction to conduct religious services online was not for the State to dictate:

“That might be an alternative to worship but it is not worship. At very best for the respondents, in modern parlance, it is worship-lite”.

Sacramental issues such as Catholics receiving the Eucharist and attending confession had not factored into government thinking, he added.

“For all these reasons, I am clear that the effect of the closure of places of worship is that the petitioners, and the additional party are effectively prevented from practising or manifesting their religion, however many broadcasts or internet platforms may exist.”

Rev Dr William Philip, senior minister at the Tron Church in Glasgow, welcomed the ruling, saying “the approach to banning and criminalising gathered church worship was clearly an over-reach and disproportionate and if this had gone unchallenged it would have set a very dangerous precedent”.

The Taoiseach and the Government were compared to Oliver Cromwell in a Dáil row over Covid-19 restrictions, closure of churches and claims that Ireland is the only EU country “effectively locking people into their homes”.

Independent TD Michael McNamara made the comparison with the English soldier who suppressed rebellion in Ireland in the 17th century and crushed the Catholic church and clergy.

The Clare TD said rights could be restricted on the basis of public health “but those restrictions have to be proportionate and necessary. In Ireland, churches and all religious denominations (places of worship) are closed”.

Mr McNamara said the Scottish supreme court had on Wednesday ruled that it was contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and disproportionate to close the churches.

“If it is disproportionate in Scotland, it is disproportionate in Ireland because we are bound by the same convention.”

He assailed Taoiseach Micheál Martin for saying on radio that we live in a liberal democracy: “Either he does not know what a liberal democracy is or the man is deluded.”

He said Mr Martin promised to govern as a republican when he was elected. “There are many republican traditions, one of which is the tradition of Oliver Cromwell. It is in that republican tradition he and the Government are currently governing.”

A constitutional challenge to the ban on public worship took a bizarre twist yesterday when counsel for the State could not confirm if the ban actually exists in law.

Businessman Declan Ganley first took the case four months ago, but it has been repeatedly postponed in the High Court.

Yesterday, he raised a recent opinion from a leading legal experts that the restrictions on public worship are merely advice, and have no force in law.

This is despite the gardai fining a priest in Cavan €500 last week for saying mass while a gathering of people were present.

Judge Charles Meenan gave the State two weeks to clarify.

Professor in law at Trinity College Dublin, Oran Doyle, said it was bizarre that, four months after the start of the legal case, lawyers representing the State need to take instructions on whether those restrictions actually exist.

New powers to force through a very permissive abortion law on Northern Ireland involves an expansion of direct rule that rides roughshod over local decision making, according to the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.

The Church had previously expressed its total opposition to the imposition of abortion laws from Westminster, and expressed grave concern that the Secretary of State might compel the North’s Health department to implement them.

However, the Right Reverend Dr David Bruce described the new regulations as “radical, and unreasonably sweeping powers”, and said they go much further than had been expected.

“[T]he regulations laid before Parliament today drive a coach and horses through Northern Ireland’s hard won and finely balanced devolved constitutional settlement. These powers not only devalue Northern Ireland’s purposely unique system of negotiated government, they also give the Secretary of State the freedom to interfere directly, and at will, with every single department of devolved government”.

“For instance, the Secretary of State is seeking to be able to unilaterally direct what should happen in Northern Ireland’s schools, taking local power and decision making away from governors, teachers and parents on sensitive issues, therefore undermining the right of schools to embrace a particular ethos,” Dr Bruce said, in a statement.

The Moderator called the intervention ill-considered and irresponsible and said it undermines Northern Ireland’s fragile devolved settlement. He called for the powers to be withdrawn.

Germany’s leading Catholic bishop yesterday criticised a request from the Government to temporarily halt public worship during a “hard lockdown” from Holy Thursday to Easter Monday.

Angela Merkel has since performed a U-turn, following a critical backlash, describing the proposal to close churches and shops over a five-day period as a mistake.

Bishop George Bätzing, president of the German Catholic bishops’ conference, had said the request had taken him by surprise: “Easter is the most important feast for us, services are not an afterthought. At Christmas, we demonstrated how we can celebrate Mass with care. We don’t want to do without that at Easter.”

The bishops said that they would consult internally on how to respond to the announcement.

As Germany attempts to contain a third wave of the coronavirus, Merkel and the state leaders had said that a strict “Easter lockdown” would take place on April 1-5.

The Chancellor and the regional leaders said March 23: “The federal government and the Länder [states] will reach out to the religious communities with the request to hold religious meetings only virtually during this time.”

All of the main Churches in the North have attacked a plan by the UK Government to force the authorities in Northern Ireland to set up an extremely permissive abortion regime.

Westminster legislated for the widespread provision of abortion over a year ago, but the Northern Executive never acted on it.

Now the Secretary of State, Brandon Lewis, is set to compel the North’s Health Service to rollout the regime over the heads of the Executive.

In a statement on Friday, The Presbyterian Church in Ireland expressed ‘grave concern’ and said the move would represent a serious undermining of devolved rule.

The Methodist Church in Ireland voiced its concern, saying the move would ‘usurp’ the role of the Northern Ireland Executive.

The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, The Most Revd John McDowell, said the proposal would heighten the sense of a democratic deficit.

Meanwhile, in a statement yesterday, the Northern Catholic Bishops said the move is an effort to bypass internationally agreed devolved structures, to foist a law on an unwilling populace, that blatantly undermines the right to life of unborn children.

Single women who want to become mothers will be given IVF as part of a raft of measures to prevent an economic timebomb caused by Scotland’s ageing population. The child’s right to a father and the natural ties are disregarded.

The government’s new strategic plan ‘A Scotland for the Future’ states: “At the moment, NHS assisted conception services are offered to heterosexual and same sex couples who meet certain criteria.

“Increasing access to NHS treatment for the purposes of increasing population could be achieved by widening access criteria to NHS fertility treatment, for example to include single people, or couples who already have a child, or by increasing the number of cycles of IVF to increase success rates.

“Further modelling would need to be undertaken to inform the demand and possible outcome of these changes and insight work to be carried out to understand if that is one of the reasons behind people not having children.”