ON THIS DAY: 3 NOVEMBER 1845: Irish Delegation visited LORD Heytesbury to act immediately and stop the export of food from Ireland because millions were starving. He declined. On that date, a delegation of concerned and alarmed Irishmen including Daniel O’Connell, Mayor O’Sullivan of Dublin and twenty others visited Britain’s Viceroy in Ireland, Lord Heytesbury. […]
March 17, 2021 will mark the centenary of the opening of Britain’s first family planning clinic at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, London. The Mothers’ Clinic gave poor and working-class women ready access to contraceptives for the first time. Funded by Dr Marie Stopes and her second husband, Humphrey Roe, it provided instruction in birth control and supplied […]
Unlike in Western countries like Australia, traditional Asian cultures place a heavy emphasis on filial piety — the expectation children will support their parents in old age. Historically, filial piety played an important role when families were large, pension schemes unavailable and life expectancy was around 50 years old. Today, however, families in east and […]
Eileen Quinn was 24 years old, seven months pregnant, and nursing her nine-month old child outside her farmhouse at Kiltartan when she was shot dead as two lorry loads of an Auxiliary division of the Royal Irish Constabulary passed her home. Eileen Quinn was murdered by British Crown Forces 99 years ago; shot from a military lorry […]
Kevin Gerard Barry was the first Irish republican to be executed by the British since the leaders of the Easter Rising. He was a 18-year-old medical student who had won a merit-based scholarship given annually by Dublin Corporation, which allowed him to become a student of medicine at UCD. Born on Fleet Street, Dublin, the […]
With an aging population, and new retirement homes popping up everywhere it seems, caring for the elderly with dignity will continue to be a big issue. A recent report in the Lancet notes: “In 2016, there were 366,000 people working to support 1.2 million older Australians. By 2050, we will need 980,000 workers to care for 7.5 […]
I was in Washington DC this time four years ago — a week before the 2016 election. The mood was eerie, not in the least because of all the morbid Halloween decorations. With skeletons hanging from trees, carved pumpkins on porches and fake gravestones littering front yards, the suburban vistas felt strangely like a scene […]
The Spanish philosopher Leonardo Polo (1926-2013) is not well known in the English-speaking world, and even if he were, his work is challenging for the lay reader. However, his ideas on what it means to be a free human being have inspired many students of philosophy, including Dutch university teacher Daniel Bernardus, who has, in this challenging year […]
The Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey is completed, connecting the continents of Europe and Asia over the Bosporus for the first time. The bridge extends between Ortaköy (in Europe) and Beylerbeyi (in Asia). Upon its completion in 1973, the Bosphorus Bridge had the fourth-longest suspension bridge span in the world, and the longest outside the […]
Due to the massive imbalance in their demographics, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announced the decision to relax the one-child policy. Under the new policy, families could have two children if one parent, rather than both parents, was an only child. Apart from the violence endured by many Chinese women who were […]
The author, Carol Nolan, is the Independent TD for the constituency of Laois-Offaly Over the course of my political career, I have often found myself wondering if anyone in government has ever actually met a real child. On the face of it, this appears to be an almost ridiculous thing to say. But the latest […]
Intolerable and hopeless (meaning without prospect of improvement) suffering is an eligibility criterion for euthanasia/assisted suicide in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada. Despite having been used as such a criterion for decades (at least in the Netherlands; shorter periods in other countries), it is still widely debated as to its meaning and applicability as an […]