The UK Government plans to allow heterosexual married couples change the legal status of their relationships to a civil partnership. The move is consequent upon the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2014 and a recent court ruling that both gay and non-gay couples should be able to equally avail of either legal union.
The move has been criticised by the Coalition for Marriage (C4M).
Calling marriage the “gold standard”, Colin Hart said that all the studies “show it’s best both for adults and for children. In marrying, couples at least have an intention to stay together for life. People need that stability.”
On the other hand, “opposite-sex civil partnerships provide no foundation for long-term commitment. They are ‘marriage-lite’ unions. All of the rights of marriage but none of the responsibilities that come with an exclusive lifelong commitment”.
He said the Government claims it wants to promote marriage, yet ministers seem intent on making it easier to end a marriage, either through no-fault divorce or downgrading to civil partnership.
“By allowing people to downgrade their marriage, the Government is creating new instability, a halfway house to family breakdown. Just because a tiny minority of people want the rights of marriage without the commitment.”
Independent Alliance Minister John Halligan is lobbying colleagues in the Dail to legislate for euthanasia in the next Dail term. Critics say euthanasia and assisted suicide always target the most vulnerable.
Halligan, the junior minister for skills, has approached several opposition TDs with a view to having them introduce a private member’s bill, as his position as a minister means he cannot do this himself. He vowed that legislation would be tabled “one way or the other” after the summer.
The Waterford TD said a number of TDs had indicated that they would back a bill.
Halligan introduced a private member’s bill on assisted suicide in the last Dail but it fell when the 2016 general election was called. It would have enabled euthanasia in cases when a person was terminally ill, over the age of 18, and had been living in Ireland for at least a year. “Terminally ill” was defined as someone who had been diagnosed by a doctor as having an “incurable and progressive illness that cannot be reversed by treatment, and the person is likely to die as a result of that illness or complications relating to it”.
The birth rate in England and Wales has fallen to a record low at the same time that abortion rate reached its highest ever.
Official figures show there were 657,076 live births last year or 11.1 per 1,000 people, the lowest rate since records began in 1938.
Separate figures showed there is one abortion for almost every three live births, giving an abortion rate of almost 1 in 4 according to the usual way of calculating the rate that excludes still births and natural miscarriages.
Earlier last week, Prince Harry announced he and his wife Meghan would have no more than two children to limit their environmental impact. Robin Maynard, director of campaign group Population Matters, said the declining birth rate was “good news for the UK”.
“People understand that a higher population means more pressure on the NHS and schools, more land being consumed for more housing that is more difficult for people to afford, more traffic and a lower quality of life. They recognise that it puts our environment under threat,” he added.
Record low birth rates are also occurring in other countries around the world. The number of births in Italy last year was the lowest since records began in 1861. Also last year, Japan produced the smallest number of births since records began in 1899.
China also saw the lowest number of births since 1961, when the country was in the last year of the three-year Great Famine precipitated by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which up to 30 million people died and birth rates crashed. The Chinese figures occurred despite the communist authorities in 2015 doubling the number of children couples could have and launching a campaign to incentivise having more children.
Newly released data from England and Wales show 1 in 4 of all pregnancies, excluding natural miscarriage and still birth, ended in abortion.
Figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed there were 657,076 live births in England and Wales in 2018, and 205,295 abortions over the same time period according to the Department of Health. Therefore, 23.8% of all pregnancies* (almost one in four) in England and Wales ended in abortion. In 2012, however, 20.7% of all pregnancies ended in abortion*. The 2018 figure therefore represents an increase from approximately 1 in 5 pregnancies ending in abortion to almost 1 in 4 ending in abortion.
In 2018, in Northern Ireland, there were 1,097 abortions (including abortions that occurred in Northern Ireland and women that travelled to England and Wales). This figure represents less than 1 in 20 pregnancies (excluding stillbirths and natural miscarriages) ending in abortion in Northern Ireland.
Catherine Robinson, spokesperson for Right to Life UK, said: “It is a national tragedy that almost 1 in 4 pregnancies (excluding still births and natural miscarriage) in England and Wales ended in abortion in 2018.
“On the other hand, these figures show the dramatic difference that laws surrounding abortion make. In 2018, for women resident in Northern Ireland, less than 1 in 20 of all pregnancies* ended in abortion (including the women who travelled to England and Wales for abortions), whereas in England and Wales, almost 1 in 4 of all pregnancies ended in abortion*.”
“If the new abortion regime that Westminster is imposing on Northern Ireland comes into force on the 21st October, there will likely be a rapid increase in the number of pregnancies ending in abortion in Northern Ireland. This will likely be made worse by the fact the law being introduced is so extreme – permitting abortion up to 28 weeks with no legal safeguards.
Harmful sexualised behaviour in children is increasing and is a “very significant and disturbing problem”, according to a leading children’s therapeutic service.
The Cari Foundation said there were 62 callers to its helpline reporting sexually harmful behaviour on children by children.
Of these, 39 were carried out by children aged 12 and under, while 23 involved assailants aged 13-17.
Sexually harmful behaviour is at the less severe end of the sexual abuse spectrum, which includes sexual assault and rape.
The figures, provided to the Irish Examiner and not revealed publicly before, also show that 38 callers reported children being sexually assaulted by children and a further 35 raped by children.
The organisation said early intervention was key as the figures showed that the older the child, the “more severe” the presentation.
“Harmful sexualised behaviour in children is a very significant, increasing, and disturbing problem and we are seeing it present through all our services in Cari,” said Eve Farrelly, Cari Support Services manager. She described the most recent figures they had compiled as concerning.
People aged 50 or over who go to church regularly have better mental health, a new Irish study shows.
The research, involving over 6,000 adults found that a majority of over 50s in Ireland attend religious services regularly, and that regular religious attendance was associated with lower depressive symptoms in this population. Observations took place for six years, from 2010 to 2016.
The relationship between being religious and mental health was found to be complex. Religious attendance was also related to having a bigger social network, which in turn had a positive effect on the mental health of the population.
Gardaí are investigating after a Catholic oratory and cross were daubed with swastikas.
Volunteers who look after the oratory at Cnoc a Chomórtais or Scouthea Hill outside Clonmel, Co Tipperary, discovered it had been vandalised when they arrived to make preparations ahead of the annual August bank holiday Mass.
Volunteer Tony Cronin said they were “shocked” to find the Nazi insignia spray painted a number of times on the tiny religious structure.
Clonmel parish priest Fr Michael Twomey said he believed it was a “sad act of vandalism from some disturbed individuals”.
“Sadly, there has been other vandalism in past years, including oil poured upon the altar area and fencing damaged,” he said. “But this incident has deeply saddened and shocked many parishioners and the people of Clonmel as a whole – young and old.”
Local Independent TD Mattie McGrath said: “Some people are suggesting that wayward young people are behind this, but I don’t agree. I think it is something more sinister.”
A UCG academic is advocating that children be taught the ‘positive’ as well as the negative aspects of porn.
Writing on the RTE.ie website, Kate Dawson said “there is a real need for youth to be equipped with information about pornography and be supported in developing skills necessary to critique sexual representations in media so that they can make healthy and informed decisions about their sexual lives.”
Defining porn literacy as “the ability to deconstruct and critique sexual messages in pornography”, she said it would facilitate “discussions on the positive, negative and neutral outcomes” of porn, so as to “help young people to understand how personal beliefs vary about the appropriateness of sexual practices seen in porn”. This would enable them to become “critical thinkers” about porn and sex.
One of her recommendations for porn literacy educational initiatives would be to reduce shame around porn use so as to encourage conversations about the sexual encounters portrayed in porn, particularly regarding sexual consent, body image and self-esteem.
“By reinforcing stigma and shame (saying porn is bad, don’t watch it), we close off conversations.”
Ms Dawson caused outrage earlier this year when she appeared on ITV’s This Morning show to advocate masturbation classes for primary school children.
State secondary schools are not implementing a directive from the Department of Education requiring them to timetable alternative tuition for students who opt out of religion due to a lack of resources.
The circular applies to State-run schools, such as community schools or those run by Education and Training Boards (ETBs), which account for about half of secondary schools or 160,000 pupils.
However, according to the Irish Times, new documents show most State schools are not implementing the circular on the basis that they do not have resources to provide alternative tuition.
ETB schools, for example, were recently directed by their umbrella body to “maintain the status-quo in relation to the provision of religious education and opting-out arrangements”.
Nessa White, general secretary of Education and Training Boards Ireland, confirmed that the umbrella body’s advice saying “our schools have not been provided with any additional resources to provide alternative classes to students who opt out. Our schools cater for these students to the best of their ability with the resources currently available to them.”
The campaign group Atheist Ireland said the failure of State schools to implement these measures means non-religious students are being discriminated against. “The practical application of maintaining the status quo means students who exercise their constitutional and human right not to attend religious teaching cannot access another optional subject,” said Jane Donnelly of Atheist Ireland.
The New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent, Carl Hulse, sincerely believes a shadowy “cabal” of Roman Catholic operatives has been working quietly to stack the Supreme Court with anti-abortion activists. His colleague, columnist Maureen Dowd, also believes a sort of Catholic “deep state” has infiltrated the court.
Dowd interviewed Hulse earlier this month and asked him about six of the nine justices on the Court being Catholic [Catholics were 20.8% of the population as of 2018. One of the six is the Obama-nominated liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and another was baptised and raised Catholic but is now a member of the Episcopalian Church] and the numerous Catholics involved in proposing the Trump Administration’s judicial picks.
Hulse said, “It’s just a fact, hard to explain. I honestly think that anti-abortion ideology is part of this, but there is a serious Catholic sort of mafia, which is probably not another term I should be using, that is driving this.”
The previous month, during a separate interview with Dowd, Hulse said, “There is a Catholic cabal . . . And it totally plays into the abortion rights fight.”
He added, “There is, like, a real Catholic underground that is influencing this probably in an outsized way.”
