Neither the Government nor University College Dublin are expected to be officially represented at the canonisation of Cardinal John Henry Newman in Rome next Sunday, despite a slew of dignitaries attending from the UK.
Cardinal Newman was UCD’s first rector and president when it was founded as the Catholic University of Ireland.
However, Prince Charles will represent Queen Elizabeth at the ceremony, along with 13 cross-party MPs and peers from Westminster as well as UK ambassador to the Holy See Sally Axworthy and the prime minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief Rehman Chishti MP.
Birmingham, where Newman founded the first English Oratory and died in 1890 aged 89, will be represented by its lord mayor, Mohammed Azim, while the Archbishop of Canterbury will be represented by Bishop of Portsmouth Christopher Foster.
The University of Oxford will be represented by Neil Mendoza, Provost of Oriel College, where Newman was a fellow and Dame Hilary Boulding, president of Oxford’s Trinity College, where he was an undergraduate.
The Irish Times reported the likely absence on Monday, and by Tuesday the letters page was registering its dissatisfaction. One writer called the State’s lack of representation ’unfathomable’, while asking if it was ‘another case of political correctness gone mad, such as the banning of Christmas cribs in public hospitals and the like?’
‘The Scourge of Domestic Abuse’ was the theme chosen by the Irish Bishops for this year’s Day for Life which was celebrated last Sunday.
The Day for Life is celebrated annually and is dedicated to raising awareness of the meaning and value of human life at every stage and in every condition.
In a statement on the issue, the Bishops said one in four women and about one in six men suffers from domestic abuse in their lifetime. “According to a 2018 report, almost nine out of every ten women murdered in Ireland are killed by a man known to them. This fatal violence is at the most severe end of the spectrum of domestic abuse. Women’s Aid says that the dangerous patterns present in abusive relationships are all too often dismissed and not taken seriously, which can put women at risk of serious assault or homicide.”
They added: “It is a deeply regrettable fact that men, women and children suffer domestic abuse at the hands of husbands, wives, parents and other family members. Violence of this kind should never be tolerated or justified. It is an offence against the dignity of the human person.”
Two TDs and a senator have initiated a challenge in the European Court of Human Rights to the requirement that the president and members of the judiciary swear an oath to God upon taking office. Other countries have similar oaths, including the US.
David Norris, an independent senator, has joined Róisín Shortall, co-leader of the Social Democrats, and John Brady, a Sinn Fein TD for Wicklow, in taking the case to the Strasbourg court.
The two other plaintiffs are David McConnell, chancellor of Trinity College Dublin and honorary president of the Humanist Association of Ireland, and Fergus Finlay, a former government adviser.
They say the declarations, which are mandatory for presidents, judges and members of the council of state, are discriminatory.
“As senior politicians and prominent members of Irish civil society, [the presidency and the council] are positions the applicants can legitimately and do aspire to being elected/appointed,” the submission states. “These requirements could prevent them from taking up office or force them to publicly declare allegiance against their conscience.”
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.”
