Month: July 2018

An Achill Island vision of Armageddon

The Preacher and the Prelate: The Achill Mission Colony and the Battle for Souls in Famine Ireland by Patricia Byrne (Merrion Press, €14.99) It is strange how the same place can have different effects on different people and at different times. We recently reviewed a book on Achill Island as it appears today to a poet…

Family News and Events

Soar your way to Bray for the display With summer comes long days and warm nights, and what better way to enjoy a summer night than watching the sky come alive with planes and acrobatic feats? At the Bray Air Display at the Bray Seafront, the whole family can sit and enjoy a dazzling display…

Defending the Faith for WMOF

WMOF 2018   Volunteers who will be speaking about their Faith to the national media during the World Meeting of Families had their first training day on Sunday, July 8, in Dublin. The primary theme of the training day was ‘How to Defend the Faith without Raising Your Voice’, based off the recently published book…

Pope
 will
 humanise 
Ireland’s
 homeless

 and
 change 
hearts
 –

 Sr
 Stan

Chai
 Brady
 and
 Davis 
Clark   The Pontiff’s focus on a “global community” will help highlight the work of Ireland’s homeless charities during his visit, and change peoples’ perspective, according to Sr Stan Kennedy. Speaking to The Irish Catholic the founder of Focus Ireland said there’s been “negative” political discourse about families “gaming the system”. “Then there was others…

India bids to freeze Missionaries bank accounts

Indian officials are seeking to freeze bank accounts of the Missionaries of Charity, founded by St Mother Teresa of Kolkata, following the arrest of a nun on child trafficking charges in Jharkhand state. State police Chief D.K. Pandey wrote to the federal home secretary last week urging the freeze to facilitate an investigation into whether there…

Summer – a time of spiritual growth

A Parent’s Perspective   We’ve all been enjoying the recent, uncharacteristically hot, weather. It’s not the typical Irish summer when you can breakfast in the garden, head to the beach several days in a row and, instead of a rainy few weeks in Ballybunion or Bundoran, it’s been more like the Costa Brava. The glorious…

A slur that cuts deep

He’s a loser! You’re a loser! Among all the hurtful slurs we mindlessly utter, this particular one is perhaps the most hurtful and damaging. It needs to be forbidden in our public discourse and stricken from our vocabulary. We’ve come a long way today in forbidding certain language in our public discourse. Mostly the terms…

An Ottoman view of our St Brendan

The World of Books by the Books Editor   The Piri Re’is is an early 16th Century Ottoman map, which has attracted a great deal of interest, of all kinds, since it was rediscovered in  Istanbul’s Topkapi Museum in 1929. Named for the admiral who had it made, it shows the coasts of the Atlantic and…

In Brief

Ireland to divest in global fossil fuels Ireland is on course to be the first country to sell off their investments in fossil fuel companies. A bill passed by the Dáil on Thursday is expected to also pass the Seanad quickly, possibly being put into law by the end of the year. The law will compel…

Dad’s Diary

I would hesitate to plot a graph projecting the expansion of my belly. However, my wife, a doctor, has no such qualms. When, last Friday, she carefully plotted the dimensions of her late-pregnancy belly on a graph, they were slightly less than they should have been. This can mean the baby is not getting quite enough…