The concerns of Catholics were invisible in the election because Catholics made themselves invisible, writes David Quinn In the run up to the general election, there were a handful of statements from bishops such as Eamon Martin, Kevin Doran and Alan McGuckian but for the most part the Church kept as low a profile as…
Catholics must vote as Catholics on election day, writes David Quinn Election time again, and if you’re pro-life it’s a very strange one because it is the first since the May 2018 abortion referendum. In previous campaigns, the focus of the pro-life movement was to support candidates and parties who were pro-life, or at…
No-one can pretend that Ireland is not becoming a more dangerous place, writes David Quinn The growing savagery of violence that is taking place between drug gangs here in Ireland has shocked a public already exposed to seemingly endless murderous incidents between rival gangs fighting turf wars and ordering revenge killings. Ireland has a long…
At the heart of every institution there are frail and flawed human beings, writes David Quinn You’ve probably seen the Netflix series, The Crown, which is a semi-fictionalised drama about Britain’s royal family. It covers the reign of Elizabeth II and follows her from the time she is a young woman and will end…
It’s unfair to say that all deaths in World War I were futile, writes David Quinn The World War I drama 1917 took away two of the big prizes at the annual Global Globe awards at the weekend, namely Best Picture and Best Director. To judge from the reviews so far, it is a wholly…
We need to have an honest and open-minded debate about climate change, writes David Quinn I confess to being in two minds about the green agenda for reasons I’ll try and explain. Green issues have pushed to the forefront of public debate in the past year. Here in Ireland, the Green party did quite well…
You cannot keep pretending that the individual is the basic unit of society to the detriment of the family or communities, writes David Quinn Power always defeats itself in the end. This, to me, is almost a law of nature. Look through history and you see this ‘law’ play itself out again and again…
It’s unlikely that your children or grandchildren will keep going to Mass unless some of their peers are doing so as well, writes David Quinn It is now coming up to seven years since the start of this papacy. What has changed in the Church in the meantime? The main thing is probably tone. The…
There is a scene in iconic film The Quiet Man when John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara go on a date. This being 1950s Ireland (in the imagination of the movie’s director, John Ford), they must take a chaperone along with them in the shape of Barry Fitzgerald to ensure all the proprieties are observed and…
The only appropriate response to refugees and asylum seekers is one of charity, writes David Quinn In his new book, Dominion, historian Tom Holland discusses the radical and transformative effect Christianity had upon the ancient world, seeding it with new ideas that shape our thinking to this day in ways we barely even acknowledge. It’s…