A prominent writer has called for schools and hospitals to be taken from the Church and handed to the State. When parents have been asked in various parts of the country do they want their local Catholic school handed to a new patron body, they usually vote no.

In response to the RTÉ One documentary ‘Stolen’, about the historic treatment of unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, Barbara Scully asked in The Irish Independent why “we still live in a country where religious orders play such a dominant role in our schools?”

Noting the large number of schools under Catholic patronage and operating with a Catholic ethos, she said, “religious orders own much of the land on which our schools and hospitals stand”.

She added: “If we really are a progressive, inclusive, equal country, we need to remove religious orders from state infrastructure now.”

With a general election coming soon, she told her readers: “Our politicians need to know our independence will only be complete when our education and health systems are free too”.

Previously, a former Government advisor, Fergus Finlay said religious congregations in Ireland should be dissolved.

Last year, the Irish author, John Banville, described the Catholic Church as an “evil” institution that should be “abolished”.

There should be a legal right to two years of ‘Early Child Care and Education’ (ECCE), the children’s minister has said. Despite voters overwhelmingly opting to keep the ‘mother-in-the-home’ provision in the Constitution last March, he did not offer any additional support to stay-at-home mothers.

A survey from a few years ago found that only 17pc of parents wanted day-care for their children under the age of five, while 49pc of respondents preferred to mind their offspring at home and another 27pc preferred a family member to do so.

Yet, on Thursday, Roderic O’Gorman said he wanted to ensure access to day-care for every child in every part of the country and added that the State needs to be “taking a greater role in the actual delivery of childcare services”.

He said: “I believe there should be a legal right to the two years of ECCE for every child, that should be down there as a statutory entitlement in the same way you have a legal right to go primary school.”

The Green Party leader also expressed support for increasing pay for childcare professionals.

It comes as the Government announced that new State subsidies for institutional childcare will come into effect on Monday.

A church in east Belfast was deliberately set alight and the incident is being investigated as a racially motivated hate crime, according to the PSNI.

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, first founded in Brazil in 1977, has been present in Northern Ireland since 2012.

Around half its 70 strong congregation is local, the rest are from various countries around the world.

A PSNI spokesman said two masked males, wearing dark-coloured track suits, arrived at the premises shortly before 9.30pm.

“An angle grinder-type tool was then used to cut a hole in the shutters before a flammable substance was thrown inside and set alight.

“Fire service personnel attended and extinguished the fire, which caused damage to the shutters and the front hall of the building, with further smoke damage caused inside the building.

“Both males are believed to have run off along Templemore Street after the incident, which is being treated as a racially motivated hate crime.”

There is no cross-culturally stable impact of income on fertility, and changes in values are more important, according to a recent review of published literature by a demographic expert.

Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, tackled the widely held beliefs that poor people have more babies than rich people, and that alleviating economic costs will not increase fertility because the poor will have babies anyway. However, he found that because different cultural groups often have unique income levels, efforts to correlate income and fertility are often “deeply misleading”.

“Global fertility decline was kicked off almost entirely by normative and cultural processes, not strictly economic ones. The effect of income on fertility is not even remotely consistent across cultures or even across times”.

He adds: “When whole societies become richer, they do not necessarily have fewer children. Once we control for the basic problem of cultural stratification, the supposed link between low income and high fertility, or high fertility and low income, largely disappears”.

Attending religious services can help prevent suicidal thoughts, new research reveals.

The findings are from the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (­Tilda), at Trinity College Dublin, based on responses from 8,000 adults.

The study explores the critical issue of social disconnection and its link to a “wish to die” among older adults.

Dr Mark Ward, senior research fellow at Tilda, said: “Both loneliness and suicide among older adults have been increasing and are now viewed as critical public health concerns. This wish for death is often a precursor to suicidal thoughts and behaviours.

“On the other hand, pro-social behaviours, including attending religious services and other communal activities, protect against these negative thoughts about one’s own life.

“Uniquely, we also show attending religious services regularly can protect against death ideation among older adults in Ireland. Our findings again highlight the importance of promoting social activities and networks to safeguard against loneliness and related ­psychological distress.”

The HSE has ordered a report into the independent Cass Review which exposed deficiencies in the care of children with gender dysphoria and prompted the UK to ban the use of puberty blockers.

It has asked Dr Karl Neff, the newly appointed Clinical Lead for Transgender Services to write the report.

He had criticised a previous HSE report into Ireland’s use of the Tavistock gender clinic for children which also operated a satellite service in Crumlin’s children hospital.

Emails reviewed by the Irish Independent showed the Report’s author Dr Orla Healy told Dr Neff that she had spoken to “colleagues” in Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) Crumlin to get “their views and assurance”.

“But I am not reviewing the service provided at CHI Crumlin,” Dr Healy said last November. “In no way is the quality or safety of the service being provided at CHI Crumlin being questioned.”

Dr Neff said Dr Healy should review source records in Crumlin, adding: “With respect, I do not believe that verbal assurances are sufficiently robust as a methodology”.

Former justice minister Charlie Flanagan called that same HSE report a “whitewash”.

Taoiseach Simon Harris and Roderic O’Gorman said they still want to see controversial ‘hate crime’ legislation being passed by the Oireachtas before the Government’s term comes to an end, despite the looming prospect of a General Election as soon as November.

“I want to see hate crime legislation passed in the lifetime of this Government,” said Mr Harris, adding that Minister for Justice Helen McEntee would be bringing forward amendments to the legislation in the autumn term.

Mr Harris said some amendments had to be made to the Bill. “There were some issues raised around making sure that nothing in the hate speech section would interact or override the absolute importance and vital nature of freedom of speech,” he said.

Mr O’Gorman said Ireland was one of the few countries in Europe that had not legislated for hate crimes. He said the Bill had been discussed by the three party leaders in Government and he was eager to see it progressed as quickly as possible.

The bill in its present form is regarded as one of the most draconian anywhere.

The Northern Ireland Executive has agreed that British rules temporarily banning the supply of puberty blockers to children would be extended to the North. Puberty blockers were strongly criticised in the recent Cass Review.

The Northern Ireland ban, which needed the support of Sinn Féin MLA and First Minister Michelle O’Neill, has led to criticism of the party by some transgender activists.

Charlie Flanagan, a Fine Gael TD and former Justice Minister, said Sinn Féin appeared to be operating a “dual policy” on different sides of the Border. He wants the HSE to discontinue the use of puberty blockers in Ireland.

The UK ban follows the Cass report’s findings that there is not a reliable evidence-base to make clinical decisions about the use of “puberty blockers” to treat gender dysphoria. Dr Hilary Cass concluded that because of the potential risks to patients’ neurocognitive development, psychosexual development and longer-term bone health, these medicines should only be offered under a research protocol.

Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk has acknowledged that he does not have the support in parliament necessary to change the country’s strong pro-life protections for unborn children.

Currently, abortions can only be performed if a pregnancy threatens the life or health of the mother, strictly understood, or in cases of rape. In practice, this results in very few terminations.

Tusk took power in December at the head of a coalition that spans a broad ideological divide, with lawmakers on the left who want to legalise abortion and conservatives strongly opposed.

Changing the law to allow abortion up to the twelfth week of pregnancy was one of his campaign promises.

“There will be no majority in this parliament for legal abortion, in the full sense of the word, until the next elections. Let’s not kid ourselves,” Tusk said during an event on Friday where he was asked about the matter.

Tusk said his government is instead working on establishing new procedures in the prosecutor’s office and in Polish hospitals in order to ease some of the de facto restrictions.

“This is already underway and it will be very noticeable,” Tusk said.

The move was part of an attack on civil society with the closure of 1,500 nongovernmental organisations.

Announced last week, the increasingly totalitarian regime of President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, further eliminated civic spaces beyond their control, while further attacking freedom of worship.

The latest closures especially targeted evangelical congregations, many of which were described as modest by independent media.

Catholic Churches have long been spied upon, according to sources, with priests having to watch their words, even during homilies. The regime has also forbidden expressions of faith, shuttering Catholic media outlets, cancelling church charitable projects and halting processions and patron saint celebrations outside of church property.