The 11 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protestors on Sunday.

Videos circulating online show around thirty predominantly elderly protesters who walked up the main church aisle after Holy Communion, carrying a variety of placards, including of injured children.

The protest received widespread condemnation on social media including from people who support the Palestinian cause and are sharply critical of Israel.

The priest celebrating the Mass appealed to them, saying: “To those of you who have come into our church at a most inappropriate time, to make your protest, . . . the Irish people have not been silent, and the Irish people have supported the voice and the actions of our government”.

“I would also like you to know that the Catholic community living in Gaza is especially in our thoughts and prayers, as well as all the people of Gaza and Palestinians everywhere”.

He then asked them to leave.

A similar protest occurred during mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, two weeks ago.

The group demanded that Christian churches, “unequivocally condemn Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid against the Palestinian people”.

This is despite the fact the the bishops have repeatedly called for a ceasefire, the Church largely leans towards the Palestinians, and the crib in St Peter’s Square in Rome featured the Palestinian scarf at one point.

The number of Christians in Bethlehem and the wider West Bank has plummeted in recent years, a trend that has only accelerated since the October 7 attack last year.

Father Issa Thaljieh of the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, said his congregation has fallen from 6,000 to 3,000 during his 13 years at the church. Ten families have left within the past few weeks.

“People are running from this place because they have no freedom, no security, no jobs,” said Thaljieh, 42, whose family have lived in Bethlehem for more than 200 years.

Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, economic pressures have been made markedly worse by the Israeli government’s tightening of movement restrictions for Palestinians.

An increasingly belligerent and emboldened Jewish settler movement also threatens to isolate Bethlehem behind a palisade of state-sanctioned settlements approved this year by Israel’s hard-right finance minister.

The threat of Islamic extremism is also of great concern, with one local saying that were anything to happen in Palestine like the takeover in Syria by a group once linked to jihadists he would leave immediately.

The Spanish Supreme Court will not recognise foreign court rulings that affirm surrogacy contracts, as they treat the surrogate mother and the child as “things susceptible to commerce.”

Commercial surrogacy is already banned in Spain.

The case involved a commercial surrogacy contract, validated by a court in Bexar County, Texas, USA, which the commissioning adults asked the Spanish Court to recognise.

Spain’s ‘Tribunal Supremo’ ruled that the best interest of the child is not decided by the interests of the intending parents, the surrogacy contract, or the assigning of parenthood by foreign law, but rather on “the severance of all ties between the minors and the woman who gestated and gave birth to them, the existence of a biological paternal filiation and a family unit in which the minors are integrated”.

The ruling follows a similar case in September, where the Court allowed parents of a child born abroad through surrogacy, by analogy with international adoption, to register the child in Spain as its place of birth and to omit the place of origin.

That ruling came despite a 2022 judgement that surrogacy contracts entail harm to the child’s best interests and exploitation of women that are “unacceptable,” and “dehumanising”.

A bill that would require the UK Government to publish an annual report on medical complications from abortions has passed its second reading in the House of Lords.

In 2018, the Government here opposed similar amendments to Ireland’s new abortion law that would have ensured the same such transparency.

Since then, there have been numerous incidents under the new law where women’s health and lives have been put at risk. One such case was the woman from Limerick who almost died following an abortion due to the presence of an undetected ectopic pregnancy.

A spokesperson for the Pro-Life Campaign said: “It is appalling the way the Government seems content to conceal the truth about what is happening under the new abortion law. Lord Moylan’s bill in the UK is a welcome development as it shines a spotlight on an area that urgently needs greater scrutiny and accountability”.

One of Ireland’s leading columnists has suggested that the world might have been better off if Jesus had been among the babies killed by King Herod’s men.

In her December 20th column for the Irish Times, Justine McCarthy describes Jesus as “one of the greatest influencers of all time”.

However, while pondering the attempt by Herod to kill the newly born “King of the Jews”, she asks: “Had the baby Jesus been among the massacred innocents, might history have turned out to be less hellish for humanity? The Spanish Inquisition might not have happened, nor the Crusades, the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years’ War, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland”.

In the column, she even seems to blame religion for the horrors of Nazism even though Hitler was guided by bogus theories about ‘racial purity’ which drew on pseudo-scientific Social Darwinist thinking.

A Church of Ireland school will review its requirement that pupils attend the school’s religious ceremonies after a complaint by a secular group. No complaint seems to have come from any parent at the school.

St Andrew’s National School in Lucan, Co Dublin is part of the local church community with strong links to the Parish church in Lucan village.

Its ethos statement notes they teach the Primary curriculum including religious education, which is normal for denominational schools.

“The essentials of the Christian faith are explored and pupils are encouraged to think independently and develop a personal faith by which they may later live”.

It adds: “Pupils are required to participate in all subject areas and attend all school religious ceremonies. As part of the culture of this school children are informed about Santa Claus, Halloween and the expectation that surrounds this. We do not permit any other view within school.”

However, the lobby group Education Equality have taken issue with the requirement, claiming children have a constitutional right to attend publicly-funded schools without attending religious instruction.

In response, Robert Grier, chair of the board of management, said the school noted the concerns raised and will review the Ethos statement.

Lone parents, households with children, single working-age adults and renters are the groups most likely to have an income that does not meet their basic expenditure needs, according to a new study by the ESRI.

Overall, 37pc of lone parent families do not meet their expenditure needs, the highest of any group. Only 9.4pc of household with both parents present and one to four children could not make ends meet. As at 2022, over 16pc of Irish children were growing up in a lone parent household.

The research examined how households’ income compares to an independently determined benchmark of the minimum needed to meet essential expenditures in Ireland.

Overall, the majority of people live in households that meet their expenditure needs. 11% of people do not, with children, renters, lone parents, and single working-age adults being the most affected groups.

School attendance among pupils has dropped significantly since the pandemic as large numbers of children miss classes for extended periods, according to a report from the Department of Education.

Meanwhile, the proportion of children who are “happy with the way they are” has fallen “substantially” since before Covid, from 88.2 per cent to 78.5 per cent, according to a wide-ranging report by the Department of Children.

Just more than 25 per cent of all primary school pupils and 20 per cent of all second-level students missed 20 or more school days in the 2022/2023 school year.

This is up significantly from 11 per cent for primary school pupils prior to the pandemic and 14.5 per cent for students at second level in 2018/2019.

“In the UK, researchers have argued that the pandemic has altered the social contract between schools and society fundamentally, and that one of the most notable casualties of this has been regular school attendance,” the report notes. “These concerns are reflected in Ireland in the most recent data provided by Tusla’s Education Support Service.”

On present trends, only 58 percent of Gen Z women and 56 percent of Gen Z men will ever marry, compared with 77-96 percent of ‘baby boomers’ (born 1946-1964),  62-82 percent of Gen Xers (born 1965-1980) and 56-67 percent of Millennials (born 1981-1996).

Commenting on the results, Research Director, Harry Benson, said it was “a tragedy”.

“There is a great deal of evidence that making decisions and acting upon them – as in the act of marriage – changes the way people see one another for the better.

“Fewer marriages means more family breakdown [because cohabiting couples break up more often than married couples]. We already have the highest level of breakdown in UK recorded history. Nearly half of all children are not living with both natural parents. It’s no coincidence that that this matches the trend away from marriage”, he said.

Last year saw another double-digit increase in Canadian citizens opting to end their lives under the country’s far-reaching euthanasia/assisted suicide law. The figure now stands at over 15,000 as both demand for the procedure and the grounds for accessing it expand. Canada has seen the most rapid growth in euthanasia of any country in the world.

Health Canada’s fifth annual ‘Medical Assistance In Dying’ (MAID) report reveals that assisted suicide and euthanasia accounted for nearly 1 in 20 deaths in the country.

Government statistics indicated that 15,343 people were euthanized by medical officials in Canada in 2023, out of a total of just under 20,000 requests. Those numbers represent “an increase of 15.8%” over 2022, the report says, a drop from an average annual growth rate of about 31%.

Though the growth rate declined, it is “not yet possible to make reliable conclusions about whether or not these findings represent a stabilisation of growth rates over the longer term,” the report said.