Public interest directors could be appointed to religious-owned hospitals if the Government accepts the recommendations of a review group. According to a report in the Times, Ireland edition, the review group shied away from recommending the State take over the health services of voluntary hospitals, but they did advise that changes be made to how they are funded and governed.
The group has proposed state representation on the boards of all voluntary organisations that get more than €20m a year from the exchequer, when this amounts to more than half their income.
If the proposal is adopted, it will mean public interest directors being appointed by the Health Minister to large non-HSE hospitals such as St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, the Mater hospital group, and the Mercy University Hospital in Cork.
Simon Harris, the Health Minister, is expected to seek approval for the appointments when he brings the report to cabinet in a fortnight.
The group says the state should allocate money for specific services rather than providing block grants, and recommends all faith-based voluntary organisations publicly state their services are available to everyone.
A member of ‘Be Here For Me’, a group that offers counselling to women entering abortion facilities, told members of the Oireachtas yesterday that she owes the life of her daughter to a pro-life person she met outside a Marie Stopes abortion clinic in Ealing, London.
Alina Dulgheriu was addressing a Human Dignity Group event on the Government’s plan to introduce ‘exclusion zones’ outside abortion facilities in Ireland. Deputy Carol Nolan, who chaired Wednesday’s meeting, said introducing exclusion zones in Ireland “would create a very dangerous precedent”. She said that buffer zones like the ones being proposed in Ireland do not exist throughout Europe and that “placing a bolt on every door to deny women the opportunity to access to information on alternatives to abortion is neither pro-woman nor pro-choice.”
Tom Curran, a campaigner seeking the legalisation of assisted suicide, has said that the reported numbers of Irish people going abroad for euthanasia are artificially low as people conceal their origin for fear of prosecution once the surviving members of the party return home.
Statistics from one clinic, Dignitas in Switzerland, show that nine Irish people have ended their lives there in the last 20 years whereas the figure for the UK was 415 and for France 330. Mr Curran has claimed the numbers of Irish who have gone to Dignitas for euthanasia could be “at least double” what the figures showed. He said: “I know several people who have travelled from Ireland in the last few years and who have used the UK as an address. They’re not registering that they’re from Ireland after the Gail O’Rorke case and that’s why the numbers appear so low.”
Gail O’Rorke was prosecuted in this country after she had brought a friend to Switzerland to be euthanised. She was subsequently acquitted.
Mr Curran is a member of Exit International which supports euthanasia on broad-ranging grounds and not just when a person is terminally ill.
During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, US President Donald Trump called on legislators to pass a bill prohibiting the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother’s womb.
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on scientific research showing that unborn children can begin to feel pain at that stage of development.
According to recent polling, nearly two-thirds of Americans support limiting abortion to the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, a statistic that includes majorities of both Democrats and of Republicans.
President Trump also gave a powerful witness to the humanity of unborn children and criticised individual states for bringing in extreme abortion measures. He cited the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child and contrasted it with what he called the chilling displays of lawmakers in New York who cheered with delight the passage of a late-term abortion law.
‘These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and dreams with the world’, he said.
‘Porn literacy’ should be included in a sex curriculum for school children say researchers at NUI Galway.
The findings, published in ‘The Journal of Sex Research’, are based on research by PhD student Kate Dawson. In her study, participants said that pornography is here to stay and, rather than trying to fight against it, youth should be equipped with the tools to use it to help them navigate their sexuality. Central to that would be eliminating the stigma associated with pornography and then helping students to distinguish good from bad pornography. Specifically, the study says, young people “need to be supported to develop the competence to distinguish between positive and negative models of sexual health and relationship from the pornography they watch.”
Ms Dawson said that at the forefront of the debate around the inclusion of pornography in sex education is the negative effects of pornography engagement, but she claimed that research showed few people experienced adverse effects from watching it.
Meanwhile, Dr Louise Crowley, a law lecturer at University College Cork, has developed a ‘bystander intervention programme’ for third and second-level students. The aim is to create a culture of zero tolerance around verbal and physical sexual harassment by empowering witnesses to call out unacceptable behaviour.
She says her research shows that the vast majority of students share an abhorrence of unwanted advances and abusive behaviour, and once they know that, it gives them confidence to speak up knowing they will be surrounded by like-minded people.
The number of young people in the UK who say they do not believe that life is worth living has doubled in the last decade, new research suggests.
In 2009, only 9% of 16-25-year-olds disagreed with the statement that “life is really worth living”, but that has now risen to 18%. More than a quarter also disagree that that their life has a sense of purpose, according to a YouGov survey of 2,162 people for the Prince’s Trust.
Youth happiness levels have fallen most sharply over the last decade in respect of relationships with friends and emotional health, the survey found, while satisfaction with issues like money and accommodation have remained steady.
Just under half of young people who use social media now feel more anxious about their future when they compare themselves to others on sites and apps such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. A similar amount agree that social media makes them feel “inadequate”. More than half (57%) think social media creates “overwhelming pressure” to succeed.
The gloomy view on life being taken by a growing minority of young people comes amid reports of an increased rate of teenage suicide. It was reported on Sunday that official statistics due later this year will show that suicides now occur at more than five in 100,000 teenagers in England. That contrasts with a figure of just over three in 100,000 in 2010.
Pope Francis appealed to politicians to defend the lives of unborn babies in remarks to Italy’s Pro-Life Movement at the weekend.
In remarks ahead of Italy’s ‘Day for Life’, he said, “I take this opportunity to appeal to all politicians, regardless of their faith convictions, to treat the defense of the lives of those who are about to be born and enter into society as the cornerstone of the common good”.
“Voluntarily extinguishing life in its blossoming is, in every case, a betrayal of our vocation, as well as of the pact that binds generations together,” he said.
Regarding the unborn of unborn children, he said: “Their killing in huge numbers, with the endorsement of States, is a serious problem that undermines the foundations of the construction of justice, compromising the proper solution of any other human and social issue,” he said.
Pope Francis said protecting life is not a one-off action but means protecting every aspect of a person’s life. “Taking care of life”, he said, “requires that attention be paid to living conditions: health, education, and job opportunities. In short, it includes everything that allows a person to live in dignity.”
He added: “When life itself is violated at its emergence, what remains is no longer the grateful and enchanted welcome of a gift, but a cold calculation of what we have and what we can use. Then even life is reduced to a one-time-use consumer good”.
Despite growing secularisation, there are more than 28,000 Catholic schools in Europe, educating over 8,500,000 pupils—almost one-third of primary and secondary students on the continent. This reality was highlighted by Paul Meany, a former principal of Marian College, Dublin (1988-2017), and current chairman of the Le Chéile Education Trust in an op-ed in the Irish Times last week.
The popularity of the schools and institutional support from States is such that even in secular France, almost 20 per cent of the population attend non-governmental Catholic schools which contract to meet the State’s requirements in teaching the national curriculum, have autonomy to employ Catholic teachers and to educate pupils in the Catholic faith as part of the characteristic spirit/ethos of the schools, and are funded by the State to almost the same level as French public schools.
Indeed, it is a consistent feature of State policy in most European countries, and it reaches equality in Scotland and in the Netherlands where Catholic schools receive exactly the same funding as public schools.
Research indicates that there are four characteristics of Catholic schools that resonate with parents that accounts for their popularity: (a) they have an academic structure and culture which is sometimes referred to as ‘bookishness’; (b) they create strong internal communities; (c) they have devolved governance and autonomy; and, of course, (d) they have the inspirational Gospel message which gives the school community a sense of mission and purpose.
The results of a wide-ranging study that surveyed the attitudes of people in as many as 35 countries suggest that happiness is tied to being religiously active.
According to the study, “Religion’s Relationship to Happiness, Civic Engagement and Health Around the World,” issued Jan. 31 by the Pew Research Center people who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged than either religiously unaffiliated adults or inactive members of religious groups
The research findings suggest that societies with declining levels of religious engagement could be at risk for declines in personal and societal well-being. And mere religious affiliation, rather than active engagement, was, by itself, not associated with a greater likelihood of personal happiness or civic involvement.
