Dear Editor, With the approach of Hallowe’en, we see lots of ugly masks, witch outfits, vampire costumes etc. in the shops. Perhaps we could do something to counteract the superstition and occult association with Hallowe’en, the eve of All Saints. Last year some people placed Rosary beads on their front door for the month of…

Dear Editor, While it is good for us to seek to defend faith-based schools in a pluralist society, I see little benefit resulting from such effort while the Church in Ireland continues to devise and use catechetical programmes which have so diluted the Catholic Faith as to make it virtually impotent. As the letters of…

Dear Editor, What are we going to do about the huge gulf that exists between the more erudite members of the Church and the ordinary people who are not being taught to meet Jesus Christ in the world of today? The teaching Church in the Vatican seems to have become an increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy. Words…

Dear Editor, Minister Katherine Zappone’s childcare scheme unfairly discriminates against stay-at-home parents. This is both unfair financially and disastrously flawed socially. The scheme sees parents who are both earning the median industrial wage, with two children in daycare, increase their previous yearly net income of €32,542 by €1920 (after tax and childcare costs). Meanwhile, a…

Dear Editor, I was amazed to read Gerard Gallagher in your ‘Notebook’ section (IC 13/10/2016) say that commentators have described Ireland’s young Catholics as “over-catechised and under-evangelised”. Any commentator who truly believes that could usefully spend half an hour in the company of Catholics in their teens, twenties, or even thirties and forties: one thing…