Notebook The report on the mother and baby homes is the latest in a line of painful spotlights to be shone into dark areas of our society during the decades following the setting up of the Irish Republic. One of the questions the report sought to answer was, why there had been the need to…

We are now at the stage of the pandemic where the gurus are emerging to bestow advice about depression and the toll that lockdown is taking on our mental health. A variety of nostrums are being offered to help deal with the stress of continuous lockdown – with little hope of eased restrictions this side…

The View Have you ever felt that perhaps you should not say what you think to the people you are with? It’s a big question. In a land in which we proudly proclaim our rights and our freedoms, we can still be afraid to say what we think, and even what we believe, because of…

The temptation to put respectability ahead of faith is the death knell for any authentic religion, writes Ruadhán Jones As a young Irish Catholic, it’s impossible not to know of the mother and baby homes, but reading the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes was still difficult. Ireland, during…

The story is complex, yet the trope of the Catholic bogeyman remains even after the report makes clear that a simple denigrating of the religious is not only misguided but false, writes Dualta Roughneen Much of the commentary around the mother and baby homes prior to the publication of the final report last week has been…

Future historians will find a more nuanced and balanced account of the past than most members of the public have been led to believe, writes David Quinn There have now been three official reports in a row that upset the accepted media narrative about the culpability of the Church concerning their subject matters. The first,…

Seamus Mulconry, born in a Mother and Baby Home, tells Ruadhán Jones that we need to acknowledge our own societal failings Seamus Mulconry is the general secretary of the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association and remains a staunch defender of Catholic schools. He is also one of the thousands of children that passed through the…

The Church and society often took it upon themselves to humiliate and exclude rather than show the love of Christ, writes Brian McCormick There is very little difference between the word teacher and preacher. I would always see John the Baptist as a preacher. Jesus is frequently referred to in the Gospels as teacher. I…

Letter from Rome In sports, people argue about who’s the GOAT, meaning “Greatest of All Time”. In basketball, is Lebron James the GOAT or is it Michael Jordan? In baseball, are we talking Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb? In college football, did Alabama Coach Nick Saban just become the GOAT by winning a seventh national…