Ireland’s existing Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) is being blamed for the continued rise in new HIV cases in the country.
Noel Donnellon from ACT UP Dublin was speaking as figures were released showing that 531 people in the country were newly diagnosed with HIV in 2018, the highest number on record.
He said: “We are absolutely in a crisis, we are seeing rising numbers of new diagnoses, in direct opposition with what is happening with the rest of Europe, and it’s not a coincidence that we also have an outdated or non-existent sex education programme compared to other countries too.” He suggested a number of elements should form part of a HIV prevention program including “better education”.
Some commentators disputed the assertion regarding RSE by pointing out that in 2017 official figures published by the HSE show that only 26% of new HIV cases involved people who were born in Ireland; 63% were born abroad; and 11% did not have information on country of birth.
Thieves have vandalised the crypt of a Church of Ireland church in Dublin and taken the head of an 800 year old mummy known as ‘The Crusader’.
The crypt of St Michan’s Church on Church Street, Dublin 7, has been badly damaged and several of the mummies, including the 400 year old remains of a nun, have been desecrated in the incident. The Crusader’s body was turned over and his head has been removed.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Michael Jackson, has expressed sadness and outrage at the incident. “I am shocked that someone would target this ancient burial place and desecrate the remains of those lying within it,” he stated.
The Archdeacon of the group of parishes of which St Michan’s is part, David Pierpoint, described the actions of the vandals as “devastating and sacrilegious”.
Polyamorists in Ireland claim they are suffering from the lack of legal recognition of their relationships and the negative judgements of their lifestyle choices. ‘Polyamory’ involves three or more people in a sexual relationship.
In The Irish Times, Sile Walsh, who specialises in ‘integrative coaching psychology’ and has a special interest in polyamory is quoted as saying that cultural non-acceptance of polyamory is one of the major stresses on poly relationships: “In Ireland, many poly people keep their lifestyle private and out of the public eye, with private groups and meet-ups for those choosing a poly lifestyle. There are a number of cultural barriers to poly[amory], one being no legal position in law for poly marriage . . . Another being ideas about what successful relationships look like and obviously religious influences.”
Apart from giving legal recognition to polyamory, the article also speaks about the parallel task of normalising the practice: “The true signifier that something has been accepted into mainstream culture is indifference; the luxury of having no particular feelings indicates a phenomenon’s normality”.
Fianna Fail leader, Micheál Martin said it was “unchristian” that one of his TDs was recently refused holy communion at a funeral mass. FF Transport spokesman, Robert Troy, TD, wasy denied communion due to his support for abortion, including voting to repeal the Eighth amendment.
“It was unchristian, it was very unchristian thing to do. It goes against… the grain in terms of the true meaning of Christianity,” he added.
In 2008, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict, said a politician could be refused Communion if they were a high-profile supporter of abortion.
Children’s experience of the legal system can be bleak and inhospitable, according to family law experts and those working with children at risk who spoke at the Oireachtas Justice Committee last week.
Chair of the Law Society’s Family and Child Law Committee Keith Walsh said there was agreement that the current family law system was broken and there was an urgent need for a specialist division to be established. Mr Walsh told members that no resources have been allocated to give effect to the voice of the child in recent legislation.”So we have a Rolls Royce piece of legislation with basically no resources attached to it,” he said.
Dr Conor O’Mahony, Senior Lecturer at the School of Law in UCC, said there was an “uneven and patchwork approach” as to whether children get to participate in family law proceedings. He said whether a child gets a chance to be heard depends on “what the case is about, where it is being heard, which judge is hearing it, and who is paying the costs”, adding that this was “a far cry from what the Constitution states should happen”.
The Government has approved plans for the building of 12 new primary schools around the country under the patronage of either non-denominational or multi-denominational bodies. The schools are to be located in the cities and commuter belts of Dublin and Cork.
For years pressure in those places has hit Catholic schools hard and they had to adopt a system of deciding who would be accepted into oversubscribed schools. Their method of granting priority to children of Catholic families has been unfairly dubbed a ‘baptism barrier’. Spokespersons for Catholic schools, however, claimed there was instead a ‘buildings barrier’ that needed to be overcome in the areas where population growth exceeded school places.
This latest announcement by the Department of Education should ease the acuteness of the problem, but it remains to be seen whether politicians will drop plans to curb the capacity of Catholic schools to give any priority to children of their own faith community.
A pro-choice GP has said he is “incredibly proud” to participate in the provision of abortion under the new Irish law, adding, “It is a privilege (and challenge) being a GP, but I have never been as professionally rewarded, as in the past seven weeks.”
Writing in The Irish Times, he dismissed the criticism of other pro-choice advocates who say the roll-out of the new regime is too slow. He said instead that the country had “set a world record for the implementation of a comprehensive abortion service”, and even claimed that “we are the envy of many healthcare systems.”
Nonetheless, despite having achieved the goal of so-called ‘free, safe, and legal’ abortion in community settings around the country, he signaled a need to expand the regime even further. This included the expansion of the number of GPs providing abortions; exclusion zones outside hospitals and GP clinics; eliminating the three day waiting period; the universal, free provision of contraception; free abortions for women from the North; and the expansion of abortion law itself to cater for women who have been “left behind, including those who are pregnant beyond 12 weeks.”
Two donor-conceived children are waiting for a court to decide who exactly are their legal parents and whether they can be taken across an international border in a relocation from Australia to New Zealand. The case has major implications for international custody disputes of donor-conceived children all over the world because, under the Hague Convention, a child cannot be taken by a parent from a member country to another member country to live without the permission of the other parent.
The children were born to a lesbian woman in Australia. A gay man is the sperm-donating father to one of the children, and is claiming parentage of both children due to his role as a co-parent. He has petitioned the courts in Australia to prevent the children being relocated to New Zealand.
The woman’s same-sex partner asked the courts to declare her the legal parent of both children, which would have involved her name replacing that of the gay man on the birth cert of the older child, his genetic daughter. Irish law will soon permit the names of two women to appear on a birth certificate.
A lower court decided that the lesbian partner was the parent of one child–the younger child conceived through an American sperm donor–but not of the older child, conceived using the sperm of the gay man. The Court’s reasoning was that the partner’s relationship with the mother was not ‘de facto’, or reasonably established, at the time of the conception of that child. The judge ruled the relationship, at that stage, was still only developing, albeit rapidly, and so the man was allowed to remain as a legal parent and was granted the injunction to prevent the children being removed from the country.
The women have appealed that decision and the case is to be heard later this year in Australia.
Abortion for reasons of non-life-threatening disability should be explicitly legalised, according to Ruth Coppinger of the far-left Solidarity party. The current abortion regime already allows abortion for any reason for the first three months of pregnancy; for health reasons for the first six months of pregnancy; and for all nine months of pregnancy where a child is so disabled it is expected to die before or soon after birth. Speaking in the Dail yesterday, Coppinger cited the case of a woman pregnant with a child suffering a serious disability who was refused an abortion. Ms Coppinger alleged that “conservative Catholic control of hospitals and a very narrow law with criminalisation are having a chilling effect and forcing such women to travel abroad”. She asked the Taoiseach why in Ireland is a “distinction made between fatal and severe abnormalities that is not made in other countries”. She also asked who decided what got onto a list of “fatal foetal abnormalities” and why it varied from hospital to hospital.
The Taoiseach said the Oireachtas decided to limit the law at aborting the disabled who were unlikely to live long after birth and the legislation would be reviewed after three years.
Ms Coppinger also called for a fully secular hospital system where there “isn’t a culture that sends people on their way” and one where, she said, the Catholic Church would not influence medical matters.
Countries such as Germany do not permit abortion on disability grounds, but they happen on a widespread basis anyway because the mother can claim a threat to her mental health.
French schools are set to replace the titles ‘mother’ and ‘father’ with ‘parent 1’ and ‘parent 2’ to avoid ‘discrimination’ against same sex parents. The bill was passed through the French parliament last week to recognise parents with the same gender. The bill was tabled by MP Valerie Petit with the aim of ‘anchoring the diversity of families with children in the law’.
The amendment says: ‘To prevent discrimination, school enrolment, class registers, parental authorisation and all other forms involving children must mention only Parent 1 and Parent 2.’
However, even some of the supporters of the idea have questioned whether the law would create more problems regarding who is designated as parent number one, and who is number two.
Other MPs are staunchly opposed to the move. Fabien Di Filippo, deputy general secretary for The Republican party, described the amendment as a “frightening ideology,” which “in the name of limitless egalitarianism promotes removing points of reference, including those regarding the family”.
