My apologies if the tone of my contribution this month is a little depressing, but I hope there might be a more positive ending! In recent weeks I have been very conscious of people being filled with fear. Our TV news bulletins have been filled with images of terrified people caught up in natural disasters.…

The Department of Foreign Affairs proudly tweeted recently how Ireland was celebrating fifty years of having lifted the “marriage bar” for women working in the public service – with the support of the EU and its march towards equality. Yes, I remember that situation well: women, on marriage, had been required to step down from…

Nobody should be forced to pay for a service they do not want. People should certainly not be required to fund obscene salaries and political activism under threat of imprisonment. There is no longer any need to force everyone with a television to pay for RTÉ. Instead, only those who wish to actually watch RTÉ…

At the end of the 2007 movie Charley Wilson’s War, about how covert American support for the mujahadeen in Afghanistan helped bring down the Soviet empire, a quote appears from the real Texas congressman played in the film by Tom Hanks: “All these things happened, and they were glorious and they changed the world.” “Then,…

Judith Sudilovsky The Stella Maris Carmelite monastery has seen destruction and banishment over its centuries’-old history, dating back to the mid-13th Century. The recent attempts by a group of Jewish religious extremists to declare the monastery a Jewish holy site has however, for the first time, led to the monks installing metal fencing around its…

Fr John Harris OP   Over the summer many of us will visit Knock. Visiting Knock is unlike visiting any other Marian shrine. For example, during the apparitions of Fatima and Lourdes, nobody saw or heard anything except Bernadette at Lourdes, and the children at Fatima. Whereas the story of Knock is completely different. The…

Everywhere I went last weekend I heard the late Sinéad O’Connor spoken about with admiration, and sympathy for the mental health turmoil she had been through during her lifetime. The praise we saw and heard over the media genuinely reflected, it seems to me, the widespread feelings for the troubled star, who was such a…

Sinéad O’Connor’s life and artistic output speak to a soul who was truly searching for the divine, writes Jason Osborne No doubt everyone is aware at this stage of the death of one of Ireland’s most iconic daughters, a woman gifted with a voice that pierced many hearts over the decades she was producing music.…

Why is the Government funding IVF and not pro-life alternatives, writes David Quinn Health Minister Stephen Donnelly has announced that the State will pay couples for a full cycle of IVF under a new scheme to be introduced in September. This is a response to the growing problem of infertility in Ireland, a problem that…

When World Youth Day opened in Lisbon, Portugal, it marked the latest edition of the most massively successful version of a “politics of identity” in organised religion today, a clear and indisputable way of proclaiming that Catholicism isn’t sliding toward extinction but remains alive and well. To be clear, organisers of World Youth Day always…