The Catholic Church wants to have an input into deciding who will teach religion in the new, VEC-run, State primary schools due to be launched in three areas of Dublin in September. However, Bishop Leo O'Reilly, the head of the Church's education commission, has denied claims that the Church is seeking a veto over such issues.

The typical profile of a young offender is a male who lives with one parent and is likely to be a drug or alcohol user, according to a study of offenders who appeared before the Children's Court in 2004.

A clear majority of Irish people still believe in God, Heaven and sin and just under half attend weekly Mass or more, a new survey has revealed.

The decline of traditional marriage has created a series of problems, including school failure, poverty and crime, teachers in the UK have claimed.

Teens who have a sexual relationship with an older partner may face adverse consequences not only in the short-term but also into young adulthood, according to new research from US child welfare research centre Child Trends.

People with a religious faith have a greater capacity to deal with traumas such as losing a job or divorce, according to a new study presented to a Royal Economic Society conference. The conference, which began on Monday and ends today, heard that a survey of thousands of Europeans showed that believers have higher levels of "life satisfaction".

If Ireland legislates to permit same-sex civil partnerships, it could be compelled under international law to legalise gay adoption as well, according to two leading family lawyers.

The proposed children’s rights referendum will not be held until next year it has emerged. The delay in the referendum is because the Oireachtas Committee established to examine the matter has decided it needs more time.

The bar for State intervention in family life is too high when it comes to effectively helping children where their parents are failing in their duty, according to Fergus Finlay, Chief Executive of children’s charity, Barnardos.

Arguments about the definition of marriage were heard in California's Supreme Court yesterday in the most important US same-sex marriage case since Massachusetts’s highest court allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry there more than four years ago.

Scholars who study the family have become more worried about the decline of marriage since the late 1970s as new research about its detrimental effects on society has become available, according to a new report.

The Government and the main churches have said that they will fight an attempt by the EU Commission to remove the right of religious organisations to exemptions from the EU's equality directive, the Irish Catholic has reported.

The Catholic Church in the US has lost more members to other faiths than any other, a new survey has shown. The study, carried out by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, found that more than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood to join another religion or no religion.

Single and cohabiting women are increasingly much more likely to commit suicide than married women, a UK report showed yesterday.

Commercialism is transforming children into selfish materialists with little sense of their own worth, according to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

A report being studied by the Government has proposed that a new welfare payment for poorer families could be financed by taxing child benefit for higher income parents, according to a report in the Irish Times. The proposal also suggests that child benefit be lowered for the third and subsequent child per family.

Lawyers for a Christian couple are to seek a judicial review of a decision by social workers to ban them from fostering young children because the couple refused to sign up to new gay equality laws.

A report being studied by the Government has proposed that a new welfare payment for poorer families could be financed by taxing child benefit for higher income parents, according to a report in the Irish Times. The proposal also suggests that child benefit be lowered for the third and subsequent child per family.

Any referendum on the Rights of the Child must explicitly vindicate “the economic, social and cultural rights of all children”, Focus Ireland, the charity which works with homeless people, has said.

The former Minister for Justice and Attorney General, Michael McDowell has reiterated his call for the Government to address the question of fathers rights. Speaking at a Bar Council conference, Mr McDowell said that the rights of unmarried fathers can be fought for in the Irish courts through the European Convention on Human Rights.

He went on to question whether current Irish law on the rights of unmarried fathers, as represented by the 1966 Nicolaou judgment, was good constitutional law any longer. Mr McDowell, who represented the father in the GT v KAO case, also known as the "Mr D" case, suggested that the case showed that there was “a fundamental and stark difference in approach to family rights in the European Convention jurisprudence and in that of the Irish courts” in this area.

In the Mr D case, the unmarried father of twin boys took legal action in Ireland and England to secure the children's return to Ireland from Britain, where the mother had taken them without his permission. The father won his case in the High Court and the Supreme Court and the children were returned voluntarily.

Mr McDowell pointed out that, in his High Court ruling, Mr Justice Liam McKechnie examined the issue from the standpoint of the European Convention on Human Rights and European law as well as Irish law. He considered whether the "wrongful removal or retention" of a child under the Hague Convention could be considered independently of Irish law and decided that it was part of an "autonomous order", that is, EU law.

This meant that the EU law recognising the convention gave a pre-eminent role to the convention, which recognised the rights of de facto families.

"The court went on to hold that the removal of the children, for the purposes of the European regulation, was wrongful even though, as a matter of domestic law, the mother as sole guardian of the children was free to bring them outside the jurisdiction without the consent of the child's father.

He said that this decision, made in 1966, was based on the fundamental premise that the constitutional family was based on matrimony. De facto families not founded on matrimony enjoyed no constitutional protections under this interpretation, he said.

Mr McDowell that even in the 1960s, constitutional expert John M Kelly had exposed the weaknesses in the Supreme Court decision in his Fundamental Rights in the Irish Law and the Constitution, published in 1967.

In considering the GT case, the Supreme Court had not looked at the European aspect of the judgment, but ruled on the more limited ground of the jurisdiction of the Irish District Court over the case, he said.

The broader issue which might have been decided by the Supreme Court, had it not decided on this narrow issue, was the approach taken by Mr Justice McKechnie to the rights of fathers under the human rights convention and the more fundamental question as to whether the Nicolaou case represented good constitutional law any longer, Mr McDowell said.

"In a society where one-third of children are being brought up in family units not based on matrimony," he added, "the view that a natural father who is caring for his children in such circumstances has absolutely no constitutional rights or protection in respect of his relationship with his children, and must accept the few crumbs that fall from the table of statutory protection, is increasingly untenable."

27/02/07