South East Technological University (SETU) will no longer punish students or staff as having broken the law if they do not use the preferred pronouns of transgender persons.

It has dropped references in its updated gender identity policy which previously stated that refusal to use students’ or staff members’ preferred pronouns would amount to “unlawful discrimination or harassment”.

The policy sparked controversy when it was published last October, with one lecturer, Colette Colfer, stating that it was a misinterpretation of equality laws and could itself discriminate against those “who do not subscribe to gender identity theory”.

Colfer, a lecturer in world religions, said she welcomed the change.

SETU’s updated gender identity and expression policy now states that all staff and students are expected to avoid “unacceptable behaviours” such as, “repeatedly referring to a person by using names or pronouns with which they do not identify, in circumstances where the person has communicated their preference”.

It does not reference the refusal to use preferred pronouns as unlawful.

Tens of thousands of Christians from churches independent of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch have been forced to flee occupied areas of Ukraine, according to a new report aired on America’s Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Simon Ostrovsky of PBS NewsHour said that since the start of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of the country, Russian forces have cracked down on evangelical congregations, Ukrainian Orthodox churches, and other denominations Russia sees as undesirable.

In a sweeping campaign that has seen at least 206 churches closed, destroyed, or expropriated, religious leaders have been kidnapped, tortured, and banished. Some 29 are believed to have been killed.

Meanwhile, the prominent religious freedom advocate, Nina Shea, says credible reports on Russia-occupied Ukraine validate the fears of Ukrainian religious leaders that a victorious Russia would “crush their religious institutions”.

An independent Senator has echoed the calls of the Pro Life Campaign for a special Oireachtas committee to examine the issue of bias and impartiality in RTE particularly in regard to its coverage of abortion.

 Senator Ronan Mullen said an “RTÉ Investigates” programme that was aired Monday night was “shocking for its one-sidedness and bias and its complete failure to depict another side of an important and distressing story”.

Calling it a “propaganda piece”, he said “pro-abortion activism was at the core of this programme”, with prominent activists centre stage, yet depicted simply as experts.

“There was no mention of this spiralling abortion rate and no mention of questions around precautionary pain relief in late-term abortions. We heard euphemistic language about what happens to a disabled or severely disabled child in a late-term abortion but no focus on the reality of what happens to the baby in that dreadfully tragic situation.”

A group of angry pro-abortion demonstrators forced local police to intervene at the University of Manchester to provide an escort to a pro-life speaker, who also had to take transport to a different location to her accommodation because of concerns about her safety.

For the second time this year, police had to be called to protect pro-life students from a barrage of abuse and physical intimidation by pro-abortion student protesters at the university after Madeline Page, CEO of the Alliance of Pro-life Students (APS), delivered a talk titled “Grill the pro-lifer”.

As Page left the talk with a police escort, a large mob of students followed her down the road screaming abuse at her, forcing her to change her travel arrangements because of concerns about further escalation. Video footage shows the mob hurling abuse and attempting to intimidate the pro-life speaker; many of the protesters are fellow young women, though wearing face masks, while putting up a middle finger toward the camera.

The Pro Life Campaign has called on the Oireachtas to investigate RTE over its abortion coverage after a Prime Time special was deemed a “new low”.

“The time for editorial accountability from RTÉ has long since passed. It’s time for programmes like ‘RTÉ Investigates’ to take a step back to give way for an Oireachtas investigation into RTÉ itself – over its non-existent editorial standards when it comes to issues like abortion,” it said in a statement.

Monday night’s program dealt with how pro-life pregnancy counselling agencies deal with pregnant women and featured an interview with, Barrister Marie O’Shea, who had conducted a mandated review of the abortion law on behalf of the Government. She called for removing the few remaining restrictions and decriminalising abortion entirely.

In a move timed to coincide with the program, a coalition of women’s, doctors’ and human rights groups released an open letter calling for the same broad set of changes to the law.

In advance of the program, the Pro-Life Campaign had questioned whether the presentation would be balanced, asking if it would air numerous scandals that have plagued the new regime or the massive increase in abortion numbers.

By Monday night, they released a new statement calling the program “highly partisan and sensationalised”.

last year the US state of Oregon had the highest number of assisted suicides since the practice began in 1998. Almost half believed they were being a ‘burden’ to other people.

The latest annual assisted suicide report ‘Oregon Death with Dignity Act: 2023 Data Summary’, released last month, has revealed a total of 367 people ended their lives by assisted suicide in 2023 in Oregon. This figure represents a 32pc increase in deaths by assisted suicide from 278 in the previous year. Assisted suicide involves a person taking a poison themselves as opposed to a doctor administering it which is euthanasia.

Among the end-of-life concerns listed by those who ended their lives, almost half (43.3pc) of those who ended their lives reported being concerned about being a “[b]urden on family, friends/caregivers”, and 8.2pc said they were concerned about the “[f]inancial implications of treatment”.

Almost 90pc said they were concerned about reduced ability “to engage in activities making life enjoyable”, 91.6pc mentioned concerns about “losing autonomy”, and 63.8pc of those who ended their lives in this way, said they were concerned about loss of dignity.

A bishop and a priest were stabbed in an alleged “terrorist act” at a Sydney church yesterday, police said, just two days after the Australian city was rocked by a mass stabbing in a busy shopping mall.

Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was presiding over a service that was being livestreamed at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in the western suburb of Wakeley, when an alleged attacker was seen charging toward him. Several parishioners immediately attempted to intervene while screams could be heard in the church.

Members of the public restrained the alleged attacker at the scene, according to New South Wales police. Police then arrived and arrested the suspect, later identified as a 16-year-old boy, who was taken to the hospital under custody and received surgery for injuries sustained during the attack.

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb told reporters that police believe the attack was premeditated.

“We will allege [the suspect] attended that church armed with a knife and stabbed the bishop and priest … We believe there are elements that are satisfied in terms of religious motivated extremism,” she said.

St Mary’s Primary School on Dorset Street is to be divested from the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin from today.

It follows a pilot consultation process regarding the patronage of primary schools in March 2022.

Twenty-nine schools in Dublin Diocese participated in the consultation process by independent facilitators appointed by Minister for Education Norma Foley.

In an initial stage, the school community opted to change to new school patronage. Following this, the school community then expressed a preference that the school become an Educate Together (ET) school.

It is the first Catholic school in the State to transfer to ET. Other examples of transfer of patronage include St Enda’s in Dublin which passed from the Carmelite order to the City of Dublin Education and Training Board (CDETB).

Archbishop of Dublin Dermot Farrell said that following the consultation process, he accepted the recommendation that St Mary’s School be divested. He thanked the parents, principal, teachers, staff and Board of Management of St Mary’s School for participating in the process.

One of the organisers, Bogusław Kiernicki, told the crowd on Castle Square in Warsaw’s old town, “it is not an [act of] grace that we allow a child to be born; it is their sacred right.”

The march took place on Sunday and followed Friday’s votes by the Sejm, the more powerful lower house of parliament, in favour of further legislative work on rival bills aimed at ending Poland’s near-total abortion ban.

While two of those bills would allow unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks, a third bill from a more conservative party of the Government coalition would return the law to its pre-2021 form: restoring abortion when the unborn child is diagnosed with a serious disability.

That proposal has the support of the most powerful members of Poland’s opposition: Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice party (PiS) and Mateusz Morawiecki, the former Prime Minister. This represents a u-turn by both. They had previously supported the 2021 ban on abortion due to disability, describing the practice as ‘eugenics’.

Catholic primary schools will continue to require a religious education certificate of teachers despite pressure from some secular activists to remove it, said the head of the Catholic Education Partnership (CEP).

This comes after members of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) who attended the recent AGM of the organisation asked their union to lobby the Church for its removal.

CEO of the CEP Alan Hynes told The Irish Catholic that in Catholic schools teachers “need to have the necessary qualifications certificates to teach religious studies and that simply is just a necessary qualification to teach in our schools.”

The INTO delegates also voted to conduct a survey among members within the next year on various issues relating to religious patronage including the role of schools in faith formation and their experiences with religious and secular patronage systems.

Mr Hynes questioned why the INTO would be conducting a survey along this vein when the Department of Education is shortly about to engage in a nationwide survey asking opinions of parents and school staff – which include INTO members.