Matt Letourneau If your child had a disability, wouldn’t you want to give them the best treatment, support and services available? According to the Disability Federation of Ireland, over 1.1 million people in Ireland have a disability — 22% of the population — and this group encounters more health, educational, employment and housing problems than…
Letter from Rome Last week Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a phone call to Pope Francis in which he urged a collective condemnation of what he said was the “ridicule” of moral and religious values at the Olympic opening ceremony. News of the call was published in an August 1 statement published on the…
Fr Shay Cullen The shocking testimonies of 2,300 victim-survivors of childhood physical, psychological and sexual abuse representing 200,000 children that suffered in government care centres and Church orphanages and institutions over the past 70 years have just been released in a New Zealand report that took six years to compile. The investigative report, Abuse in…
Notebook I think it was former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds who said in his resignation speech; “it is the little things that can trip you up”. I’m sure President Biden might agree. He mixed up the names of a few world leaders and it cost him his chance of a second term. But perhaps the incident…
What were we supposed to make of the Olympics opening ceremony last weekend? It very strongly divided opinion, for reasons to be explained. An Olympics is still an exciting event, even it has lost some of its allure and romance because of drug scandals and probably because it has got so big and commercialised as…
Sport is one of those activities that I greatly approve of in theory, but, alas, in practice, find mostly rather boring. I applaud the wonderful principles behind that motto so often advanced in times gone by – notably by the religious orders in education – mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind in a…
As a student at the University of Toronto decades ago, I used to ride the subway downtown and, occasionally, would find myself sitting next to a man in full make-up, dressed in a mini-skirt and high heels. Raised in the sheltered suburbs, it was a bit of a shock but, having been taught to treat…
Dean Céitinn Following his election as Green Party leader, Roderic O’Gorman has signalled his intention to bring the Hate Speech Bill back into the legislative agenda. This was after months of speculation that the Hate Speech Bill would not proceed and die when this Dáil completed its term. However, renewed calls to proceed with the…
Eduardo Campos Lima An unprecedented wave of violence in Sierra Madre de Chiapas, the mountain region in the southern border of Mexico, has been causing deaths and famine among several communities. Earlier last week, hundreds of people fled to Guatemala. The Diocese of Tapachula, which includes parishes in the mountain communities caught in the middle…
After a strongly negative response from several thousand users, the Vatican quickly took down an online poll last week on the concept of “synodality”, which is at the heart of Pope Francis’s high-profile consultation process set to conclude in October with a Synod of Bishops in Rome. Published the morning of July 25, the poll…
David Quinn
Mary Kenny
Martina Purdy