Northern Ireland must be on agenda

Dear Editor, I was delighted to hear that Pope Francis has announced that the next World Meeting of Families is to be held in Dublin. Will this mean that the Pope himself shall visit, perhaps including Northern Ireland while he is here, and Knock too?

Either way, the decision to host the World Meeting of Families here could hardly be better timed. 

One thing the marriage referendum has taught us, surely, along with increasingly strident demands for the introduction of assisted suicide and the abolition of our constitutional protections for the unborn, is that Irish people are forgetting what marriages are and what families can and should be. 

A festival of families to remind us of this could be just the tonic we need!

If the Pope himself comes, that would be even better, of course, but if that’s on the cards our Church will need to be ready to nurture whatever seeds he plants. 

We may be a battered Church now, but we’re not a beaten one; we have three years to get ready, so we should start now.

Yours etc.,

Louise O’Leary,

Clondalkin, Dublin 22.