A huge inquiry into child abuse at the hands of various institutions, both Church and secular, has been underway in Australia for some time now. It is taking place under the auspices of a body called the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Despite the fact that it is investigating a range…

David Mullins Dr Rhona Mahony is Master of Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital at Holles Street. She is a vocal critic of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution which protects the right to life of unborn children. She has spoken frequently about how the amendment affects her work and the work of other medics dealing…

Considering how important a subject education is, it’s interesting to observe that relatively little national attention was paid to The Sunday Times list of top 100 Irish schools, just published. Could this be because it is glaringly evident that Catholic schools continually emerge as the gold standard in educational attainment? Take the Salerno Jesus and…

We often like to flatter ourselves that if we lived under conditions of persecution for our faith we would have the resilience and courage to risk persecution in order to stand by what we believe. I wonder if this is true though? In much of the world, Christians are savagely persecuted for their faith, and…

Young Jewish people don’t want to draw attention to their creed due to anti-Israel sentiment in Ireland, according to a Jewish representative body. Irish Jewish people are conscious of being overt about their Judaism as they “do not want to attract the generally obsessive nature of anti-Israel demonisation which goes on in Ireland”, according to…

There’s a famous billboard that hangs along a congested highway that reads: You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic! Good wit, good insight! How glibly we distance ourselves from a problem, whether it is our politics, our churches, the ecological problems on our planet or most anything else. We aren’t, as we want to…

One of the great challenges that Pope Francis is setting before the Church is the need for Catholics to get out of their comfort zones and bring the Gospel closer to people. Francis likes to talk about the absolute urgent need to reach out to what he describes as the “existential margins” or “peripheries” of…

I am reminded of the somewhat cynical remark made by someone a few years ago when he said “it’s well for those who can afford to say their prayers abroad”. It was a comment on the many thousands of Irish people who every year travel to places of pilgrimage like Lourdes, Fatima, Medjugorje, Rome, the…

It’s crisis-time for students, and it’s especially crisis-time for students seeking accommodation. The situation, particularly in Dublin, is dire. We know it’s dire for homeless families as well, although the needs of students, and of families, are different. The solution for families is for more family homes to be built, pronto. The solution – or…

Ronan McGreevy Fr Willie Doyle SJ died as he had lived: fearlessly in the service of others. He ventured into no man’s land to give extreme unction to two officers lying wounded in a shell hole. Another German shell landed among them. Their bodies were never recovered from the battlefield. Fr Doyle was one of…