Legislation to enable the use of donor sperm, eggs and embryos, that was rushed into law prior to the Marriage referendum in 2015, will be corrected by another piece of legislation that is set to come before the Dail soon.

Provisions for the creation of a register to allow donor-conceived children obtain personal family information once they turn 18 and to ban anonymous gamete donation was contained in 2015 Children and Family Relationships Act. But the minister at the time did not commence enactment of parts two and three of the legislation which would have brought the measures into force immediately. “During the preparation of regulations to facilitate the commencement of parts two and three of the Act, a number of technical drafting issues came to light that required amendments to the Act of 2015 through primary legislation,” a Department of Health spokesman said. Mr Harris received Government approval last week to draft an amendment to the Bill to remedy the defect. The Minister “hopes to be in a position to introduce this legislation into the Dáil as soon as possible and commence parts two and three of the Children and Family Relationships Act in the autumn”. The department was responding to the announcement last week by international clinic Institut Marquès that it was offering women undergoing IVF in Ireland the use of anonymously donated eggs without having to travel abroad. This new bill would aim to prohibit such a practice.

A group of lesbian activists blocked the start of the Pride in London march Saturday in protest against men who identify as transgender, lesbian women.

Using a banner that read: “Transactivism erases lesbians” and another that said “Lesbian = female homosexual”, one of the activists shouted: “A man who says he’s a lesbian is a rapist”. They also distributed a flyer that said: “The trans movement is… coercing lesbians to have sex with men. We firmly condemn this vicious form of anti-lesbianism disguised as progress.”

Speaking to Gay Star News, Jan Williams from a group called Object said: “Transgenderism is conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is wrong.” She continued: “Only women can be lesbians. A man who has surgery can never be a lesbian.”

Sarah Mason, founder of Get The L Out, told GSN the group is an alliance of lesbian and feminist organisations. She said her sexuality is seen as transphobic and exclusive “just because we are women attracted to women.”

“We don’t want any kind of penis in our bedroom,” she said. “I’m really sad I have to reassert this again. It’s everywhere online – it’s everywhere in LGBTQ centres.”

There is a danger that suicide prevention may change into suicide assistance according to speakers at a symposium in Oxford this week. The Anscombe Bioethics Centre, a Catholic academic institute, held a three-day symposium on the ethics of psychiatry and mental health care this week. One of the speakers was Professor Patricia Casey, a patron of The Iona Institute.

Michael Wee, the education officer at the Centre said psychiatrists and mental health professionals are precisely the kind of persons those who are suicidal might go to for help.

“The shift to suicide assistance, by the very people whose role we customarily think of as being suicide prevention, is one that will therefore interest and, indeed, alarm many,” he said.

Earlier this year, medical professionals in the Netherlands performed euthanasia on a 29-year-old woman suffering from depression and other mental ailments, after the country widened its euthanasia laws to allow it for those with mental illnesses. Euthanasia for people who are not terminally ill, but suffering psychiatric disorders, is also legal in Belgium.

“We wanted to highlight the way that physician-assisted suicide is also a mental health issue and that the norms of suicide prevention should also apply to people to are seeking to end their lives by assisted suicide,” said David Albert Jones, the director of the centre.

A Special Envoy on Freedom of Religion or Belief has been appointed in the UK to promote international religious liberty and fight persecution. Lord Tariq Mahmood Ahmad, Minister of State for the Commonwealth and the United Nations, is the very first person to be selected for the role. Lord Ahmad “will promote the UK’s firm stance on religious tolerance abroad, helping to tackle religious discrimination in countries where minority faith groups face persecution,” the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said in a statement Wednesday.

Ahmad said he was delighted by the appointment and plans to “use the UK Government’s global network to reach across religious divides, seek the elimination of discrimination on the basis of religion or belief and bring different communities together.”

“In too many parts of the world, religious minorities are persecuted, discriminated against and treated as second class citizens. As a man of faith, I feel this very keenly,” he said in a statement.

“Freedom of Religion or Belief is a human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It must be respected. People from all faiths or none should be free to practise as they wish. This respect is key to global stability, and is in all our interests.”

Lone parents forced to take up work by changes to the One Parent Family Payment actually suffered a fall in income, a new study shows. The report, from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), finds the changes, which were introduced by former Tánaiste Joan Burton in 2011, resulted in employed lone parents who had been in receipt of the payment losing 1.9 per cent of income while their non-employed counterparts saw no change. The drop in income by those who went into paid employment was due to the cost of childcare and the low wage, part-time jobs they were working.

About 99 per cent of recipients of the payment are mothers. In Ireland, in 2016, 17.6 per cent of children lived with a single parent – just above the OECD average of 17.1 per cent. The report also said that Ireland does stand out in terms of poverty and deprivation experienced by these lone parents. “Persistent poverty . . . was 26 percentage points higher among lone parents than for other adults compared to an average gap of between five and 20 points evident in other countries. This indicates that poverty among lone parents in Ireland appears more endemic and not solely due to transient shocks such as short-term loss of employment.”

Church leaders in Nigeria have said that Christians are experiencing “pure genocide” as 6,000 people, mostly women and children, have been murdered by Fulani extremists since January.

“What is happening in Plateau state and other select states in Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately,” said the Christian Association of Nigeria in a press release last week.

The church leaders said that they are particularly worried at the widespread insecurity in the country where “wanton attacks and killings by armed Fulani herdsmen, bandits and terrorists have been taking place on a daily basis in our communities unchallenged”. Despite huge investments in the security agencies, they say the perpetrators are being deliberately allowed to go scot free.

“It is even more worrisome that these huge numbers of over 6000 deaths in 2018 alone have been recorded in various attacks, especially in the northern and middle belt states”, adding, “There is no doubt that the sole purpose of these attacks is aimed at ethnic cleansing, land grabbing and forceful ejection of the Christian natives from their ancestral land and heritage.”

The press release also pleaded with the international community, as well as the United Nations, to intervene in the Fulani attacks, fearing they might spread to other countries as well.

The latest HSE figures for births in the country’s 19 maternity units estimate 61,902 babies were born last year. This figure represents a decline of 1,844 since 2016 and a precipitous drop from a high of 75,554 in 2009. The annual birth rate stands at 12.9 per 1,000 of population, compared to 16.1 per 1,000 population in 2007.

The only two maternity units to show an increase in births were in Portlaoise Hospital and Mullingar Hospital. The largest fall in births was in Mayo, where the number of babies born last year dropped to 1,547, down from 1,650 in 2016. Even in Dublin a sharp decline was recorded with births in the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street down by 5.3pc.

A healthcare worker was arrested on Tuesday morning and taken into custody by police in the UK on suspicion of murdering eight babies and attempting to kill a further six. This is the first police investigation into child deaths in hospitals in nearly 30 years.

Police launched an investigation into the deaths of 15 babies and six non-fatal collapses at the women and children’s unit of the Countess of Chester hospital between June 2015 and June 2016. The force said on Tuesday the inquiry had widened to cover the deaths of 17 babies and 15 non-fatal collapses between March 2015 and July 2016.

Prosecutions of healthcare workers are rare and frequently difficult. Barrister Anthony Haycroft told the Guardian newspaper proving intent was crucial. In the Countess of Chester case, he said the police “will be looking first of all at the intent and if there was an intention to kill, it is murder. If it is a dangerous act irrespective of any intent, it is gross negligence manslaughter. In both cases, there has to be causation – for the actual death there must be a connection between the medical act and the death.”

A fertility clinic operating in Ireland will offer a new service styled as ‘remote’ IVF allowing anonymous eggs from abroad to be inseminated in Spain with sperm from a client in Ireland and the resulting embryo will be flown back to Ireland to be implanted in a woman here. The scheme would allow people to skirt forthcoming laws here that will make anonymous egg donation illegal while also saving women the inconvenience of having to travel abroad for an embryo implantation.

The Institut Marquès, which has clinics in Dublin and Clane, Co Kildare, said “cross border reproductive treatment” could be stressful for patients. With their new programme, “it’s the embryo that travels. This method offers a safe, efficient and comfortable option to carry out treatment in the patient’s country of origin”.

The clinic said the semen sample of the male partner is frozen at the country of origin such as Ireland and sent to a laboratory in Barcelona, where IVF is carried out with the donor’s fresh eggs. Once fertilised, embryos are vitrified (frozen) on their fifth day of development and sent back to Ireland so embryo transfer can be carried out by the patient’s own doctor in her country of origin.

Prof Deirdre Madden, an expert in medical ethics at UCC, said a lot of countries had egg shortages as generating them involved an invasive procedure including use of ovary stimulation drugs, and was not as easy as sperm donation. In relation to Ireland, “it’s less about the law and more about getting eggs. There is nothing preventing having the egg procedure done here”, she said.

Girls are banned from wearing skirts at 40 secondary schools across England as schools opt for gender-neutral uniforms to cater for transgender pupils and to address concerns about female modesty.

The head of one such school said: “The reason for the uniform change initially is about equality, and decency. Our students will all now wear the same uniform. It is a much more decent uniform and it is far less likely to lead to abuse. It is a gender neutral uniform, and we’ve thought carefully about that, ensuring that is was gender neutral.”

He added: “We have transgender students in the school and we have an increasing number of students who are at that crossroads of understanding around their gender. So this uniform removes the need for anyone to make a decision about whether they wear a so-called male or female uniform.”

At another school skirts were deemed “undignified and embarrassing” for staff and visitors when girls sit on the floor for assembly and in drama classes. In Bradford, numerous schools with a high proportion of Muslim pupils do not allow skirts on modesty grounds. Bans are also common in Leeds and Grimsby. In Ipswich, eight secondary schools prohibit them, which means the majority of girls attend “trouser-only” schools.

Pupils at one school are resisting the imposition of the trousers-only policy arguing that a ban on skirts is “sexualising” pupils’ bodies. Its female pupils also argue that they feel more confident in skirts and forcing them into trousers could damage their mental health.

“If any teacher believes seeing a child’s leg is in any way ‘too sexual’,” states the petition, “they should be sacked immediately for gross misconduct.”