Legislation allowing a referendum to take place on eliminating the waiting period for divorce from the constitution has been passed by the Seanad.
As the Thirty-eighth Amendment of the Constitution (Dissolution of Marriage) Bill was passed by the Dáil last week, it now goes to the President to be signed into law.
The debate in the Seanad centred on a proposal by Senator Lynn Ruane, that the referendum should also delete two other restrictions on divorce, namely, that there be no prospect of reconciliation between the spouses; and that proper financial provision be made for spouses, children and dependants. Senator Ivana Bacik further expressed a preference that the waiting period in subsequent legislation might be reduced to one year “in keeping with EU norms” rather than two.
Minister Flanagan responded by saying he didn’t want to complicate matters for the electorate and so wanted to focus solely on the time requirement and the recognition of foreign divorces. Regarding the ‘no prospect of reconciliation’ clause, he assured the senators that it is viewed merely as a “formal proof” to be satisfied and is therefore “unlikely to impede any significant number of persons in bringing applications for divorce.”
The Government of the State of Quebec have proposed an “Act Respecting the Laicity of the State”, known as Bill 21, that would prohibit public servants “in positions of authority” — teachers, police officers, Crown prosecutors, and prison guards, for example — from wearing religious symbols. In Ireland, Gardai will be permitted to wear head-scarves and turbans, it was recently announced.
The Government argue that the law would be an affirmation of the separation of religion and state. Critics say it contravenes not only religious freedom, but also equality, as it doesn’t ban a Muslim man from wearing a religiously inspired beard, but does ban a Muslim woman from her chosen way of presenting herself. Nonetheless, polls show it has up to 75% popular support.
Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, opposes the bill saying: “It is unthinkable to me that in a free society, we would legitimise discrimination against citizens based on their religion.”
Irish people are waiting longer to get married and fewer people are engaging in it, new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) show.
The average of an Irish groom now is just over 36 years of age, while brides are about two years younger.
In the past 50 years the average age of grooms decreased from 28.4 in 1968 to 26.2 10 years later, before rising to a high of 36.4 last year. A similar trend is evident for brides, with the average age falling from 25.5 in 1968 to a record low of 24 in 1978, and increasing to a high of 34.4 last year.
The number of all marriages (opposite-sex and same-sex) registered in 2018 was 21,053 which equates to a crude (unadjusted) marriage rate of 4.3 per 1,000 population, 0.3 less than the 2017 rate. This is 968 fewer marriages than in 2017 when 22,021 marriages took place.
In the first major overhaul of U.K. divorce law for 50 years, new legislation will enable couples to split up simply by filing a statement to say the marriage had broken down irretrievably. Couples will be able to divorce in as little as six months.
An application can be made by just one of the spouses, and the other spouse will not have a right to legally contest the divorce, even if they disagree with it.
The plans include a “cooling off” period of six months to allow spouses to reconsider any decision to break up.
Bishop Peter Doyle of Northampton, speaking on behalf of the English and Welsh bishops, said the proposals were flawed.
“If notice can be given by just one party that they wish to leave the marriage without any recourse for the party that has been left, the equality and validity of that contract and the trust and commitment vital for its success will be undermined at the outset,” said Doyle, chairman of the bishops’ Marriage and Family Life Committee.
The “cooling off” period was an “insufficient time for the couple to consider any prospect of reconciliation,” he said.
“It may, in fact, push couples headlong into making new arrangements for themselves and their children without first giving them the time necessary to work through the decision to end the marriage,” the bishop added.
He said the government should invest in “good marriage preparation and initiatives which help make marriages work.”
A clinical psychologist has warned parents that they need to talk to their children about pornography and teach them not to watch it. Writing in the Irish Independent, David Coleman, an adjunct associate professor at the School of Psychology, UCD, said that pornography can act powerfully on a teenager’s brain so they can get rapidly addicted to it. Furthermore, he said regularly watching pornography “leads inevitably to teens moving on to more extreme forms of pornography to get aroused”. This, in turn changes their sexual “tastes” and they can “become desensitised to things that they previously may have considered disgusting, degrading or dangerous”.
Professor Coleman warns that parents need to educate themselves and recommended a website called “Fight the new drug”. Then, he advised a no-nonsense approach with children: “Much like we need to promote an abstinence message in relation to alcohol to preteens and younger teens, we must do the same with pornography.”
The only NHS transgender clinic in the UK for children is risking a “live experiment” by sending hundreds of kids for life-changing medical interventions without sufficient evidence of its long-term effects, experts have warned.
The Times in London has spoken to five clinicians who resigned from the service because of concerns over the treatment of vulnerable children who come to the clinic presenting as transgender.
They believe that some gay children are being wrongly diagnosed as “transgender” by the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic.
All five former staff were responsible for deciding which trans-identifying youngsters should be given hormone blockers to halt their sexual development from as early as eleven years of age. The vast majority of those who begin blockers go on to irreversible cross-sex hormones once they reach 16.
The NHS specialists warned that vulnerable children and teenagers had been sent down the path towards transition before experts had time to assess the causes of their gender confusion.
An Oxford professor has also raised concerns about the safety of drug therapies used by the clinic, saying the treatments were “supported by low-quality evidence, or in many cases no evidence at all”.
The number of young people referred to the clinic in north London has soared. In 2010 there were 94 referrals. By last year there were 2,519. The youngest was aged three. The five clinicians are among at least 18 clinical staff who have resigned over the past three years.
Several hundred people attended the National launch in Ballyfermot, Dublin, of the new political party Aontú led by Peadar Tóbín TD, who left Sinn Fein because of his pro-life stance.
At the meeting on Saturday, Mr Tóbín said they have now formed 65 Cumann throughout the country. “In three months we have held 40 public meetings throughout the country. No other political party has engaged at such a community level with the people of Ireland for many years. Well over 5,000 people attend those meetings,” he said.
“Many are sick and tired of the membership dis-empowerment of those parties and the disconnect that exists between these leaders and the workers on the ground. This diversity is one of the major strengths of Aontú,” says Mr Tóbín.
The party is also expected to run up to 65 candidates in upcoming local and European elections.
Media coverage of the event has focused on one question from an Irish Times journalist about immigration even though the topic was not even raised during the three hours of speeches at the launch, and is not a central platform of the party. The party released the full audio of the question and answer on social media in order to refute suggestions that they were “anti-immigrant”.
The Archdiocese of Dublin has announced it is postponing a vote on the divestment of schools in North county Dublin after significant resistance was expressed last week by parents and teachers.
It will delay the vote until a survey of parents of pre-school children in the area is published. It also said it is vital that all stakeholders are fully informed of what a change in patronage entails.
The Minister for Education, Joe McHugh also said last week the Department would review the process of divestment.
Meanwhile, one school gave a strong response to the Minister’s remarks. In a letter to the Minister, the board of management of Scoil An Duinnínigh rejected claims that it was scaremongeing over warnings that religious events like Christmas would not be celebrated.
“Christmas is marked along with other festivals in multidenominational schools, but in a Catholic school Christmas is celebrated. The children sing carols, draw and craft religious items, listen to readings from the Bible and so forth,” the letter states.
“Are you guaranteeing that this will continue in school time no matter which patronage body is eventually selected as the one for the divested school?”
It added that it was “frustrated and annoyed” over the divestment process, with “absolutely no information coming from the Government”.
Two separate Church ministries to persons with same-sex attraction have been subject to condemnation by gay-rights advocates in the last few days.
On Saturday protestors demonstrated outside a conference being run by the True Freedom Trust (TFT) in a Baptist church in south Belfast. TFT, which is a member of the Evangelical Alliance, describes itself as “a Christian ministry that offers pastoral support and biblical teaching on same-sex attractions”. The protestors accused the group of advocating so-called “conversion therapy”. However, TFT director Stuart Parker denied this and said it’s “particularly for people who hold to an orthodox position on sexual orientation, what the Bible says about it, and who have chosen themselves to maybe live a celibate life and encourage them in that.”
Meanwhile, former President Mary McAleese launched a broadside against the Catholic ministry Courage, which helps adults, 18 and over, to abstain from acting on same-sex sexual desires.
Ms McAleese, the former Ireland president, said that Courage was “Machievellian, dangerous and deliberately specious”.
The civil proceedings brought against ‘Father Ted’ comedy writer Graham Linehan by a transgender lawyer in the UK, have been dropped. He had been charged with defamation, libel and harassment, for allegedly ‘deliberately misgendering’ and ‘dead-naming’ the lawyer who was born a man but now identifies as a woman.
The proceedings were launched while Linehan was expressing his scepticism of transgender ideology on social media. The crux of his disagreement with activists concerned the phrase ‘trans women are women’. For Linehan, it is something of a courtesy, but is not literally true, whereas for trans-activists, it is literally true.
He said he began talking about the subject when he saw women being driven off twitter, harassed, and even fired from their jobs for criticising gender ideology. He saw it as a form of bullying and thought he would join the fray.
Given it all to do again, he would, he says, do things a little differently. But only a little. “I did not take into account the effect that the constant harassment and smearing and vilifying and suing would have. And it has been tough.”
