Letter from Rome With the imminent departure of Joseph Donnelly as the US Ambassador to the Holy See, it seems likely the post will be vacant for a while. It would make little sense to try to ram through a nominee before the election in November, and afterwards it can take a new (or returning)…
Notebook In recent weeks, I presided at the funeral of a young man who died by suicide. He was one of several who died in the same way in recent months here in the South-East. His tragic death was heart-breaking and devastating for his family. In preparing the homily for the funeral Mass, I was…
How are our teenagers faring, and more specifically, what about our 13-year-olds? This is the question examined by a new report from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) called ‘The Changing Social Worlds of 13-Year-Olds’. Here is the short version: compared with 13-year-olds ten a decade ago, today’s 13-year-olds get on a bit better…
O’Connell Street is surely Ireland’s best-known thoroughfare, named after ‘The Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell just a hundred years ago, in 1924. How interesting to learn, from Christine Casey’s peerless architectural survey of Dublin, that the city Corporation had voted to change the name of Sackville Street 40 years previously, in 1884, but the local residents objected.…
Knock and the door shall be opened to you!” is an oft-quoted scripture. But it can be a tricky process for candidates seeking a vote at election time. An old politician’s trick, to avoid unpleasantness, was to hang back on the footpath while canvassers knocked the door. Years ago, I heard a story from a…
When the Covid-19 pandemic emerged we were repeatedly told that we must “trust the science”. There was no scope for argument. Those who questioned the construction of the new mRNA vaccines and their universal administration were ridiculed and called anti-vaxxers. Yet those vaccines did not have full approval when they were administered to millions of…
A society can best be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members. Unfortunately, Ireland’s current treatment of unborn children with disabilities, chiefly Down syndrome, leaves a shameful mark on our society. During the referendum campaign in 2018, government politicians and prominent Yes campaigners tried to pour cold water on entirely reasonable forecasts from…
Last week the media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, released an updated draft online safety code which will now be submitted to the European Commission for assessment. The code focuses on video-sharing platforms that are headquartered in Ireland. This in itself is problematic, for example, Snapchat which is hugely popular among young people doesn’t have their…
Fr Myron J. Pereira For several decades in the last century, it was taken for granted that secularism was an important component of modernity. This was undoubtedly the inspiration behind the Constituent Assembly declaring in 1950 India a “secular republic” and not a “Hindu rashtra” (nation). How society existed yesterday… Traditionally, most societies have had…
In 2015, the governments of Ireland and Kenya played an important role in co-facilitating the global agreement that is known as the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs as you may have heard them called The impact of the work of Ireland and Kenya together had the potential to be huge but it is starting to…
John L. Allen Jr.
David Quinn
Mary Kenny
Martina Purdy
Nuala O’Loan
Eilis Mulroy
Wendy Grace