Easter might be late this year, but Lent has come early for a group of Irish men, who have signed up for ‘spiritual bootcamp’. While the Lenten journey is 40 days, an estimated 1,000 Irish men are about halfway through a 90 day experience – which includes daily cold showers and no television. “It’s Lent…
I believe the majority of us favour the flourishing of the Irish language (even if some school pupils do try to obtain exemptions – it’s not an easy subject to master). And in Northern Ireland, as I’ve written previously, I think the Unionists have been daft to try to oppose its introduction: they should have…
In early February, newly appointed Minister for Education, Helen McEntee, announced the final phase of the free textbook scheme. The scheme now extends from primary schools to all post-primary students except those attending fee-charging institutions at a cost so far of €191 million. The Department of Social Protection has instituted free hot school lunches for…
The war in Ukraine has now been raging for three years with hundreds of thousands dead and injured on both sides. A few weeks after the invasion began, I wrote a piece for this newspaper that I think has aged very well. I said: “Here is one very plausible scenario if peace is not arrived…
A Cambridge theologian I once heard asked her audience to consider the importance of the forty days, weeks, years – be it for Christ, 40 days, or Moses and the people of Israel, 40 years. She told us that it was seen in the ancient world as the period of gestation for a human baby…
It took them long enough! Finally, the Iona Institute, whose CEO is David Quinn, a columnist with The Irish Catholic, has had their ban on X (formerly Twitter for those of you as social media disinclined as I am) lifted. Crazily, the ban on advertising on Twitter was imposed in 2019, so the charity (yes, it is a Charity) has been a victim…
Every so often in world politics, someone comes along who is a game changer and it is very exciting to be alive to witness it – particularly when that someone (within the space of a week) manages to quote St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and Pope St John Paul II. I write of course about…
In the book of Genesis, we hear God tell Cain: “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” And these words echo, in my own heart, each time the media revisits the assassination of John F Kennedy, whose Irish roots run deep into the soil of County Wexford. He was the first…
During my apprenticeship as a rookie journalist, many decades ago, I was taught some rudimentary rules about the law. The first was an emphasis on the difference between ‘the accused’ and ‘the convicted’. There was a sacrosanct rule in every liberal democracy that everyone has the right to be judged innocent until and unless they…
It was a simple enough question, posed by a priest who had entered religious life as a youth around 50 years ago. “What is a priest’s ‘job’?” My first thought was: bringing the body and blood of Christ to us through the power of the Holy Spirit, the greatest ‘job’ in the world. But that…
Martina Purdy
Mary Kenny
Breda O'Brien
David Quinn
Maria Steen