The drumbeat has grown incessant in recent months: religious congregations, we are told time and time again, agreed to pay half the cost of the State’s redress scheme for those who lived in industrial schools and similar institutions, and have not done so. Technically, it is admitted, they only legally agreed to pay €128 million,…

As I sat down to write this I was very pleased to learn that Frances Fitzgerald, the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice, is asking for a “root and branch review” of An Garda Síochána, for a Patten-style international commission to examine Irish policing, as Lord Chris Patten and his Independent Commission provided a blueprint for…

There’s an interesting link between Brexit and Michael Collins. In planning its withdrawal from the European Union, Britain is dusting down the old documents of procedures followed  when Ireland – the 26 counties of the Irish Free State –  left the United Kingdom in 1922-23, as a template of how it was done. As we…

The Pope’s representative Archbishop Charles Brown left Ireland this week to take up his new posting in Albania. Soon, a replacement will be appointed and a new archbishop will come to present his credentials to President Michael D. Higgins and act as a visible sign of unity between the Church in Ireland and the Holy…

Discussions about Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on love and the family, even if they have not set ordinary parishes ablaze have, at least in certain circles, been characterised far more by heat than by light, especially since last September. That month saw Pope Francis respond to draft guidelines from the bishops of Buenos Aires…

Fr. Bernard Healy Last week Fr Tony Flannery attracted the attention of The Irish Times with a blogpost entitled ‘How Much of Church Doctrine do we Really Believe?’ The Church’s credibility problem in Ireland, he argues, rests on something deeper than recent scandals. He argues that “[s]ome of the very basic doctrines of the Church no longer…

Albania is a regional Church that Archbishop Brown gets to sculpt When it was announced that our Papal Nuncio was being dispatched to Albania, there was shock that firstly the nuncio was leaving after only five years and secondly, Albania! Some in Church circles saw Machiavellian motivations behind the appointment by the Vatican. There is…

“A new type of Church – more lay-led – will have to emerge”, writes Michael Kelly Archbishop Eamon Martin recently said that priests and bishops need to get used to “letting go” of the central role in parish communities if faith is to be re-energised. In many ways, it’s not an issue of choice: declining…

“I hear certain sarky remarks about this being “a new definition of having it all”, writes Mary Kenny There was a young woman of my acquaintance who, a couple of years ago, disappeared from view, and then returned as a male, having had a sex change operation. She was always a boyish kind of girl,…

Congratulations to Katie Ascough on becoming president of UCD’s student union. It is a great victory, not least because she made no secret of her pro-life views or that she is a person of faith. It gives great hope to other students and young people in general, that Ireland does not always have to be…