A bill to provide two weeks’ extra paid leave for working mothers and fathers has been jointly published by three Government Ministers.
The provision will apply to the parents of children born or adopted from November 1st this year and will be available to the self-employed as well as employees.
The Parental Leave and Benefit Bill will first go through the Seanad and then the Dáil and is expected to be passed by November 1st.
Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan, Minister for Employment Affairs Regina Doherty and Minister of State for Equality David Stanton are all promoting the bill.
Ms Doherty said “It will provide working parents with a further opportunity to spend more time with their new baby during its first year, which is of particular importance.”
There is nothing in the bill for stay at home parents, nor anything that would encourage parents to take an extended leave of absence from work to mind their children, during their all important first year.
Pro-choice groups in Galway and Derry picketed a screening of Unplanned, a pro-life film that depicts the story of one woman who left the abortion industry after witnessing an ultra-sound guided abortion.
The protest in Salthill on Friday followed the release of Unplanned in 18 Omniplex cinemas across Ireland at the weekend and was attended by Green Party councillors Pauline O’Reilly and Martina O’Connor.
Cllr. O’Reilly had written to Omniplex describing the film as ‘right wing propaganda’ and requested that they ‘not continue to screen the film’.
The official Aontu twitter account reacted with scorn to the politically motivated ‘censorship’: ‘From burning books to closing down films they don’t agree with. This is new liberal Ireland in 2019. As uniform, rigid and intolerant as it ever was. Censorship is alive and well as 14 thugs seek to close down a screening of “Unplanned”.’
The Pro-Life Campaign said the protest was bizarre and intolerant.
Elsewhere, pro-abortion groups admitted they lobbied cinemas to not show the film. Naomi Connor, from Northern Ireland’s Alliance For Choice, said “Our understanding is that most cinemas were contacted [by pro-choice activists] and chose not to screen the film. We can’t say the film should be censored — that’s not our role — but we would ask those cinemas [that] choose to screen it to reflect on the harm it is doing women.
Precious Life also blasted the ruling, saying it contradicted “the UN convention on the rights of the child – signed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – which states very clearly that every child ‘…needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth…every child has the inherent right to life.’”
The UK Supreme Court had essentially made the same determination as the High Court in the North in a prior case, but did not grant the ruling on a technicality, namely, that the party who brought the case, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, did not have standing as it was not a victim.
Yesterday’s case was taken by a woman who could not get an abortion in Northern Ireland when her own child was diagnosed in utero with anencephaly. The Court ruled she did have standing and granted her claim that the law denying her access to abortion was a breach of the UK’s human rights commitments. The judge also said she would wait a week before making a formal declaration of what must happen next.
The Ceann Comhairle and Taoiseach yesterday shut down a question by Aontú TD, Peadar Tóibín, about the wrongly diagnosed child that was aborted at Holles Street Hospital.
Deputy Tóibín raised the case at the behest of the parents of the child as a review of the case still has not commenced and the family involved “have had no input into the composition of the panel or the terms of reference”.
Mr Toibin told the Dáil that the mother has said she was examined by only one obstetrician, even though the law requires examination by two physicians. In a meeting with the Minister for Health, Mr Toibin said the Minister acknowledged to the parents that the medical notes indicated that the legislation was breached and it was also accepted by officials that a case such as this could be a case for the Garda.
However, the Ceann Comhairle said he was “deeply uncomfortable about the raising of a specific matter of this nature which may be the subject of litigation or inquiry,” and the Taoiseach said he too was “reluctant to discuss in the Chamber the medical history of any individual or anything of that nature”.
The parents of a brain-damaged girl will be allowed to take her abroad to continue her treatment, the UK High Court has ruled.
Five-year-old Tafida Raqeeb has been on life support at the Royal London Hospital since suffering a traumatic brain injury in February.
Her parents have organised funding to take her to the Gaslini children’s hospital in Genoa, Italy.
But UK specialists had argued any further treatment would be futile.
Bosses at Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs the hospital in Whitechapel, had asked the judge to rule that ending Tafida’s life-support was in her best interests.
Her parents said doctors in Italy would continue to treat their daughter until she was diagnosed as brain dead.
They argued that Tafida was from a Muslim family and Islamic law said only God could take the decision to end her life.
Former head of the European Commission Service Catherine Day has been appointed to chair the new Citizens’ Assembly on gender equality. She most recently chaired the Independent Review Group that was established in July 2017 to examine the role of voluntary organisations in publicly funded health and personal social services.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced the appointment in the Dáil following Cabinet approval.
The assembly was originally scheduled to be up and running by the end of October but Mr Varadkar said it was now intended that the assembly would meet for the first time before the end of the year and will run over six months.
The Taoiseach told his Fine Gael party colleague Kildare North TD Bernard Durkan who raised the issue, that the secretariat was already in place and the next stage was to select 99 citizens to participate in the new assembly.
They will be chosen through random sampling of the electorate from the electoral register, following the completion of a tender process for a polling company to carry out the selection process.
The Northern Ireland Office has confirmed that it will be launching an abortion marketing campaign across Northern Ireland in early November, if the recent abortion law changes go into effect on October 21st.
Spokesperson for Right To Life UK Catherine Robinson said: “100,000 people in Northern Ireland are alive today because Northern Ireland did not accept the same abortion law that was introduced into Britain in 1967.
“This move to launch a nationwide abortion marketing campaign across Northern Ireland promoting abortion is a blatant attempt by the Government to further undermine the will of the people of Northern Ireland. It adds insult to injury after Westminster voted to impose one of the most extreme abortion laws in the world on Northern Ireland and could lead to an even larger increase in the number of lives lost to abortion.
“The clock is ticking. The people of Northern Ireland now have only 20 days to stop this. If Stormont reconvenes by October 21st, this extreme abortion law will not be imposed on Northern Ireland. It is up to the people of Northern Ireland to demand that Sinn Fein and DUP reconvene Stormont now.”
Hundreds of health professionals have written to the Northern Ireland secretary expressing opposition to the radical liberalisation of the North’s abortion laws.
Those who signed the letter said their concern was for pregnant mothers and their unborn children and, as Christians, it was their firmly held belief that abortion was the “unjust and violent taking of human life”.
The doctors, nurses and midwives also want reassurance as “conscientious objectors” that they will not have to perform or assist abortions.
One GP told BBC News NI that he and more than 700 other healthcare workers had written to Northern Ireland Secretary Julian Smith and Richard Pengelly, the permanent health secretary, to say they can no longer “stay silent” on the issue.
Dr Andrew Cupples said he was not aware of any preparation to ensure staff were prepared for the law change and insisted legal protection was essential.
Blaming Catholic schools for anti-Catholic bigotry and sectarianism in Scotland amounts to abhorrent victim-blaming when Catholics are often the main victims of such attitudes.
That’s according to Barbara Coupar, director of the Scottish Catholic Education Service, who says it is time to fight back against the accusation.
Writing in the Scottish Catholic Observer, she said the statement that Catholic schools cause sectarianism is suggesting that “teachers are educating towards a culture of prejudice and our children are bigots”. Addressing parents she said, “What is being said is that by choosing to send your child to a Catholic school, you are the cause of the centuries of hate crimes in Scotland and you are part of the problem.”
She added that this, along with attacks on other fronts against Catholic schools, reveal a wider agenda: “a removal of faith from the public square and a society where rights, respect and tolerance are afforded to everyone, except people of faith.”
Drawing a parallel with the #metoo campaign, she lamented that the Catholic community must “respond to the allegation that it is our ‘fault’ that sectarianism, a crime most notably committed against Catholics, is caused because we won’t just ‘assimilate’ into Scottish culture and accept a secular education imposed us”.
Government restrictions on religion – laws, policies and actions by state officials that restrict religious beliefs and practices – have increased markedly around the world over the decade from 2007 to 2017, according to Pew Research.
The research also found that social hostilities involving religion – including violence and harassment by private individuals, organizations or groups – also have risen since 2007.
The latest data shows that 52 governments – including some in very populous countries like China, Indonesia and Russia – impose either “high” or “very high” levels of restrictions on religion, up from 40 in 2007. And the number of countries where people are experiencing the highest levels of social hostilities involving religion has risen from 39 to 56 over the course of the study.
