The Iona Blog

The Mater should have stood up to the State’s bullying tactics

Officially at least, the Mater hospital has decided to comply with the new abortion law. This means we now have two Catholic hospitals in Ireland  – the other one being St Vincent’s – that have raised no ethical objection to carrying out abortions on certain grounds. In his Irish Independent column this week, David Quinn...

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‘A good Catholic meddles in politics’ says Pope Francis

One would think from much of the media coverage of the Pope’s big interview that he was telling Catholics to take a step back from politics and pro-life and family issues most of all. What received far less coverage were remarks he made a few days earlier that Catholics ought to “meddle” in politics. At...

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Department of Education targets ethos of Catholic schools yet again

The Department of Education have launched a consultation process to ascertain the views of parents as to how Catholic schools, when they are the only one in a given area, should become more ‘inclusive’ towards children from other religions and none. A leaflet will be sent to parents and it draws on the recommendations, published...

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A breakthrough as an official Irish report acknowledges the importance of family structure

The new Growing Up in Ireland study, published yesterday, acknowledges the importance of family structure and cites research that saying having two parent is generally better than one. Given the huge reluctance on the part of ‘official Ireland’ to ever own up to this research, this has to count as something of a breakthrough. The...

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Same-sex marriage leaves Australian voters cold

Australia recently recently threw the Labour party out of office after six years in government. One of the major  planks of Labour’s election campaign was a promise by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to legalise same-sex marriage. It got him precisely nowhere. According to the blog, Mercatornet, “[Rudd] pushed it all the way to election eve...

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Til Faith Do Us Part: What happens to interfaith marriages?

                    What happens when you marry outside your belief system, whether that be a religious belief system or a secular belief system? The answer, frequently, is trouble as ‘Til Faith Do Us Part’, a new book by Naomi Schaefer Riley from Oxford University Press makes clear....

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Even the UN thinks family structure affects children

Last week, the Iona Institute released a report detailing the extent of marital breakdown and the proliferation of new family forms in Ireland, including a surge in the number of children raised by lone parents. Iona Institute representatives debated this issue on a number of programmes and came up against a flat-out denial that there...

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If the natural ties don’t matter then why was this decision made?

Gay couple David Tutera and Ryan Jurica have gone their separate way just months after taking delivery of half-twins via a surrogate mother. Tutera is biologically the father of one child and Jurica is father of the other child. Advocates of sperm and egg donation and surrogate motherhood constantly tell us that the biological tie...

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As individualism takes hold, marriage and religion decline

The British Social Attitudes survey, which has been running annually for 30 years now, was published yesterday and showed that, over the course of those 30 years, there has been a steep decline in the numbers who think marriage is important for raising children and those who identify as religious. The numbers aren’t really surprising....

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Refusing to see rising marital breakdown as a problem

This week The Iona Institute launched a new report called Marriage Breakdown and Family Structure in Ireland. The headline figure is that divorce and separation in Ireland has risen sixfold since 1968. As at Census 2011, almost 250,000 Irish adults were separated or divorced. I appeared on a number of shows to discuss the report...

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