For a quarter of a century now, the ‘grooming gangs scandal’ has rumbled on in Britain – as report after report emerged about young white girls being sexually abused by older males, these being mostly from Pakistan. From Rochdale, Oldham, Bradford, Telford, Huddersfield, Rotherham, Birmingham, Oxford came accounts of thousands of youngsters, some aged 12,…
I was unable to view RTÉ’s recent programme Housewife of the Year, because I am not presently in Ireland, and the RTÉ player doesn’t allow access to viewers outside the State. So, I won’t comment on the quality or content of Ciaran Cassidy’s documentary, which examines RTÉ’s Housewife of the Year TV contest, running from…
I am as apprehensive of Artificial Intelligence as the next person, and the notion of robots governing so much of our lives is worrying. How many jobs will be lost when AI does everything from accountancy to keyhole surgery? Will authors and writers lose control of their own texts once AI can compose words as…
One of Pope Francis’s critiques of modern society was that too many people prefer to have animal pets rather than children. In 2014, he described this trend as “selfish”, and returned to the theme in 2022, when he called it “a denial of fatherhood and motherhood” that “takes away our humanity”. Well, the pattern has…
Well before the same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland– currently celebrating its tenth anniversary – I think I sensed that attitudes were changing. Back in the 1990s, after Mary Robinson held a soirée in Áras an Uachtaráin for gay citizens, I had a conversation with an entirely conventional Irish Catholic grandmother, who would then have been…
Last weekend, in the small, picturesque seaside town of St Agnes in Cornwall, a plaque was unveiled to the hundreds of thousands of unmarried mothers in England and Wales who had been subjected, in the past, to forced adoptions. The plaque is situated at Rosemundy, which was once a mother-and-baby home in the West of…
I hadn’t heard the word ‘neurodiverse’ until about a year ago, when a teacher friend mentioned the condition was increasing among school pupils. Since then, I’ve been aware of this widening diagnosis in children and adults. As I understand it, ‘neurodiverse’ basically means human brains function in different ways; but some people who are neurodiverse…
If there is a morality tale of our time, it may plausibly be woven around the sad story of Virginia Giuffre, Jeffrey Epstein, Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell. In the tumult of what was known as ‘the permissive society’ – more accurately, a licentious society – two lives have ended in suicide, one in irrecoverable…
Pope Francis was a widely beloved personality, and it was graceful to see even some Unionist politicians pay tribute to the Holy Father. His memoir, Hope, co-written with Carlo Musso, was an enjoyable read and brought an insight into Francis’s thinking and influences. Growing up in a poor barrio of Buenos Aires, he learned to…
One of the most famous quips that Bernadette Devlin – as a young and fiery Member of Parliament at Westminster – ever made was: “There’ll be no rioting in the golf clubs!” She was responding to concerns about civil unrest in Northern Ireland, which arose to confront the discrimination that prevailed in its governance.…