The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously held that the state of Wisconsin violated religious freedom when it denied a tax exemption to a Catholic charity after claiming that the group’s undertakings were not “primarily” religious.

The state allows organizations “operated primarily for religious purposes” to be exempt from paying into the state’s unemployment system. But the charity was denied this status because it offers its services to people of all faiths and does not focus its efforts on converting the people it serves to Catholicism.

The Catholic Charities Bureau is the social ministry arm of the Catholic diocese in the city of Superior and it provides “services to the poor, the disadvantaged, the disabled, the elderly and children with special needs”. It does not discriminate on the basis of religion or require the recipients of its charity to be Catholic.

The ruling means that religious freedom doesn’t apply narrowly to the worship and evangelising aspect of churches, but also applies to their social outreach.

A lawyer from an international firm was arrested in Brussels Friday for peacefully displaying a sign that read: “Children are never born in the wrong body.”

Lois McLatchie Miller, a Senior Legal Communications Officer with ADF International, was detained alongside Canadian child protection advocate Chris Elston while surrounded by an angry mob.

Despite the pair’s peaceful conduct, police chose to arrest them rather than address the aggression of the crowd that had encircled them. The two were then transported to separate police stations where they were ordered to remove their clothes and were searched.

They were ultimately released without charge after several hours but police said the signs were going to be destroyed despite neither person being charged or convicted of any crime.

Paul Coleman, Executive Director of ADF International, said: “This is the type of authoritarianism we challenge in other parts of the world, and it’s deeply disturbing to see it here in the very heart of Europe. While we are grateful our colleague has been safely released, we are deeply concerned by her treatment at the hands of the police in Brussels.”

Many children who do not live with their fathers have little contact with them, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) has found.

Researchers interviewed close to 10,000 (9,793) households with a three-year-old child as part of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) longitudinal study.

1,172 or 12pc reported the child had a non-resident parent. Contact details were provided for almost 400 (all of them fathers) and responses were obtained from 137 of them. They presented a mixed picture.

Less than half (46.7pc) of non-resident parents reported spending seven nights or less with the three-year-old in a typical month.

Of the primary resident parents who provided contact details, almost four in ten (37.2%) reported that the other parent had daily contact with the child, whilst 13.6% reported that contact occurred less often than weekly (every second week, monthly, less than monthly, or never).

Of those primary resident parents who did not provide contact details, approximately one in eight (12.7%) reported that the non-resident parent had daily contact, and 55.8% reported that the non-resident parent had contact with the child less than weekly.

The number of inpatient beds in public acute hospitals will need to increase by at least 40 per cent by 2040, reflecting continued increases in the population, particularly at older ages.

That’s according to a new Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) report.

The research found that the rising demand for hospital services is largely driven by population growth and ageing. Ireland’s population is projected to increase from 5.3 million in 2023 to between 5.9 and 6.3 million by 2040, with the range reflecting differing assumptions on future migration trends. Importantly, the number of people aged 65 years and over will increase from 1 in 7 of the population in 2023 to 1 in 5 by 2040, only 15 years from today. This age group are particularly high users of hospital services, accounting for over 60 per cent of inpatient bed days in 2023.

A recent paper by the Iona Institute showed that a decline in religion has a knock on effect on marriage and fertility rates as people of faith tend to have more children than others. This means that as the influence of religion in Irish life wanes, the trend of an ageing population will accelerate.

The abortion rate of babies with Down Syndrome in Scotland has increased by more than 80 per cent in four years as the total number of abortions in the country hit a record high last year.

The figure is an 82 per cent increase from 2021, when there were 33 such abortions.

The figures also show that there were 280 abortions where a baby had a disability. This number is a 26% increase from 2021, when there were 222 such abortions.

Lynn Murray, spokeswoman for Don’t Screen Us Out, a charity which wants to update the legislation to ensure that unborn babies diagnosed with Down Syndrome are not singled out by abortion law, said: “It is deeply concerning that despite the leaps advocacy groups have made in raising awareness in support of people with Down’s syndrome, abortion in the case of Down Syndrome is still so commonplace and widespread in the UK”.

The Government has delayed commencing surrogacy laws amid concerns they could clash with an EU directive aimed at preventing human trafficking.

In April 2024, the EU expanded its directive against trafficking persons to include the “exploitation of surrogacy”. The Government is obliged by law to adhere to such directives.

EU nations such as France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Austria, Sweden, Norway and Spain had all banned surrogacy already. In Greece and the UK it is legal only if it is non-commercial, although in practice, thousands can still be earned by surrogate mothers under the cover of ‘reasonable expenses’.

Despite this, Ireland legalised the use of international commercial surrogacy in June 2024.

However, that law has not been put into operation by the Government, with Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill saying she cannot give a timeline as to when it will be commenced.

The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) said Ireland has an obligation to ensure its laws do not enable exploitative surrogacy and has raised concerns that Irish attempts to enable the use of international surrogacy could thwart other countries’ efforts to clamp down on commercial surrogacy and trafficking.

Rónán Mullen, an independent senator who opposed the surrogacy provisions last year, said that it “allows for the commissioning of poor women in poor countries to provide their babies to richer individuals, financially advantaged single people or couples here in Ireland,” he said.

“That can only be described as a form of modern-day trafficking and slavery.”

A rise in dog ownership worldwide reflects a growing desire to nurture without the demands of raising children, researchers have suggested.

As most of the world now experiences “sub-replacement fertility”, dog ownership has gained in popularity and, in most European countries, a quarter to half of households own at least one dog.

While dogs have long been considered family members, the researchers found that “an increasing number of owners have begun to regard their dogs as their children.”

They added that “some owners might see their dog as a child surrogate to spoil, others actively choose to have dogs and not children”. Owning a dog could “offer an opportunity to fulfil a nurturing drive similar to parenting, but with fewer demands than raising biological offspring”, the researchers said.

The study, published in the journal European Psychologist, asked: “Given the two trends of more dogs being viewed as family members and a decline in the number of children, an important ­question arises: are people choosing dogs as a substitute for children?”

The natural rate of population, that is births over deaths, has dropped in half in just 10 years, according to new CSO data.

This is despite the overall population steadily increasing during the same period.

Last year births exceeded deaths by 18,889. This compares with a figure of 38,367 ten years previously.

The slowing rate of increase has occurred consistently since 2014, except for 2021 when the rate of natural increase rose from 4.8 per 1000 to 5.0, primarily because a lot of people delayed having children the previous year when the Covid pandemic began.

In 2014, the usual resident population was estimated at 4,645,400. In 2024, this had risen to 5,380,300, chiefly through immigration.

The combination of natural increase and positive net migration led to a population increase of 98,700 (+1.9%) in the year to April 2024. This was the largest population gain since 2008 when the population increased by 109,200.

Nigel Farage would ditch the two-child benefit cap to make having children “a bit easier for British families”.

The cap blocks parents from claiming Universal Credit or child tax credit for more than two children.

It was introduced by the Conservatives in 2017 to cut the benefits bill and has been retained by the Labour Government.

It has been loudly criticised by leaders of the Christian Churches, with the archbishop of Canterbury calling it “cruel” while the Catholic Bishops of Northern Ireland condemned it as “morally abhorrent”.

In a major speech, Farage said scrapping the two child benefit cap would mean that for lower paid workers,  it would make “having children just a little bit easier for them. It’s not a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it helps them.”

He added that it would be aimed at British families, not “at those that come into the country and suddenly decide to have a lot of children.”

The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has allegedly been open to such a change, in order to tackle child poverty, but has faced pushback from his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, regarding the £3.5 billion cost, with a widespread expectation that she would raise taxes to fund it.

The Conservatives continue to defend the benefit cap.