The demand for Catholic education remains strikingly high, but what is the value, asks Tracey Harkin Some 23 years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland is still not a society at ease with itself. Recent months saw substantial street violence. Frequently we hear integrated schools being heralded as the answer to these divisions. “Educate…

Ruadhán Jones hears about the successes and hardships of lockdown-life in Irish prisons By international standards, the Irish Prison Service have been very successful in containing Covid. While in the US, infection and death rates in prisons exceeded those of the general population, no deaths were recorded in Irish prisons and few Covid cases. “They…

Our population is boosted by young migrants, but we are still aging rapidly and declining sharply, writes David Quinn Last year, almost 4,000 fewer babies were born in Ireland than in 2019. This is partly a Covid-effect. Countries around the world have experienced a bigger than usual fall in their birth rates, presumably because of…

Letter from Rome Covering the Catholic Church is a tough gig for reporters, not least because we’re often forced to be killjoys. We’re forever put in the position of raining on a media parade, and such was the case again Friday with the sensational “resignation” of Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich. In reality, that was…

The new series of laws and provisions set out in the revised section on crimes and penalties in the Code of Canon Law will help the Catholic Church in its efforts at safeguarding, said two canon lawyers. Pope Francis promulgated the new changes in ‘Book VI: Penal Sanctions in the Church’, and they will go…

Notebook A few years ago I found myself in a pub – remember them? – for a friend’s engagement party. There I got chatting to a young doctor. We got chatting about our studies, and he was astonished to find out that I had studied science as an undergraduate yet somehow ended up a priest.…

“Will you watch the new film, The 8th, about the 2018 referendum?” I asked a friend who had canvassed for the pro-life cause in that plebiscite. “Through gritted teeth,” she replied. The film was, as the film critic Donald Clarke put it, “ecstatic” for its’ natural constituency – that is, the pro-choice side. (It is…

The View Even three years on, many of us are still grieving the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. The grief is not as raw as it once was but it will probably never go away. It is so tempting to give up and to decide that the gulf is unbridgeable. Thankfully, most pro-life activists have settled…