Are older people kinder and more considerate of others than the younger generations? Yes, they are, according to a global study carried out by the University of Birmingham – involving more than 46,000 people in 67 countries. During the Covid-19 pandemic, older people were more likely to maintain social distancing for the benefit of others,…

Last Sunday, Pope Francis launched a two-year worldwide consultative process that could give a much greater say to lay Catholics and “people on the margins of society” (see pages 8-9). I’m sure this will be rewarding, and yield many valuable responses. But as the Hollywood wag Sam Goldwyn, famous for his malapropisms, once said: “Include…

Members of the British royal family are not supposed to get involved in anything political or controversial: but Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, has pointedly supported current campaigns protesting about violence against women. She sent flowers, and tweeted about the horrific murder of the primary schoolteacher, Sabina Nessa, and attended a huge protest about the killing…

Catherine Corless is greatly to be admired for her work revealing the extremely distressing facts about the Tuam Mother and Baby home, and she has now told her own story in an autobiography, Belonging. Ms Corless rebuffs the suggestion, which was included in the report of the commission on Tuam, that “it was us, society,…

The point about the new Texas abortion law which few commentators seem to grasp is that Roe v. Wade divided America disastrously, and should never have formed a nationwide ruling on the subject of abortion. It was passed by the Texas state legislature, in both upper and lower houses, by a democratic vote, and with…

Cecilia Ahern always has interesting themes for her novels, and her new book Freckles is based on a lofty moral ideal. It was, she says, inspired by the expression that “you are the average of the five people you spend most time with”; so she decided to create a character, Allegra, whose ambition is “to…

And so Irish fertility figures continue to fall: statistics just announced from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) disclose that there were more deaths than births in the first quarter of 2021. Pattern of decline Births were down by 476, a fall of 3.3% from the first three months of 2020. This is all part of a…

Khola Hasan (pictured) is an academic lawyer and scholar at the British Islamic Sharia Council, and she caused controversy last weekend by defending the Taliban on a BBC religious programme. She said that Muslims in Britain – “every single Muslim” she knows – were celebrating the Taliban victory in Afghanistan; and that the victorious Taliban…

For centuries, numberless men and women have lived lives of involuntary celibacy: they have never found a partner with whom to settle down. The Irish were, traditionally, cautious about marriage – often because so many farms were small and inheritance was uncertain – so they lost their opportunity to find a spouse. There were many…