Dualta Roughneen, Author at Catholic Herald

Dualta Roughneen

‘Dignitas Infinita’ is a commendable rebuttal to secular human rights manipulation – but that won’t stop the declaration being used by its antagonists to create more waffle

April 10, 2024

Dignitas Infinita. The Latin for “Infinite Dignity”. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s new Declaration on Human Dignity arrives at a time in history where the idea of human rights is starting to eat itself. One of the core messages of the Declaration is that the Church sees that human rights are being co-opted by

A good (Catholic) politician is hard to find in Ireland: John Bruton dies at 76

February 08, 2024

With politicians in Ireland generally feted for their perceived adherence to progressive values and grandiose speeches that garner the affection and appreciation of an avowedly liberal establishment, the death of John Bruton offers a reminder that there used to be a type of politician cut from a different cloth who did not bend his knee

FEATURE: ‘The Last Priests and Nuns in Ireland’ – a missed opportunity to move beyond the same old tropes

January 25, 2024

I get a knot of anxiety in my stomach when I hear news of another documentary about religion or, rather, about Catholicism in Ireland. It isn’t because I am squeamish and don’t want to face up to the scandals the Church has faced and been part of in Ireland, or because I can’t deal with

Was Irish bard Shane McGowan let down by his own funeral Mass and by his Church?

December 12, 2023

No one does death like the Irish. So the saying goes. Or so we tell ourselves. When a funeral cortege makes its way from the Church to the graveyard, people come out of their houses to stand on the side of the road to pay their respects as the hearse passes. Many people walk solemnly

The Church did not fail Sinéad O’Connor, modern Ireland did

August 01, 2023

In its 2022 report on human rights in Afghanistan, Amnesty International summarises the situation which would not be unfamiliar to most people on the street: The Taliban conducted extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, torture and unlawful detention of perceived opponents with impunity, creating an atmosphere of fear… Public executions and floggings were used as punishment for

Irish nuns should be thanked – not demonised

April 28, 2023

A good news story related to Irish Catholicism featured across mainstream news outlets this week as 21 Cameroonian women travelled to Ireland to give thanks to the Irish Holy Rosary Sisters who taught them decades ago in Our Lady of Lourdes Secondary School in Mankon Cameroon. Graduating in 1986, the class came together from across

Irish government ignores in-depth report in favour of emotive poem

February 27, 2023

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, gave an insight in parliament last week about how policy is made. Speaking in the Dáil, he told of how a poem by former Minister for Children, Katherine Zappone, read out during a ministerial cabinet meeting, convinced him that he needed to introduce a scheme of redress for residents of

Dublin archbishop calls residential zoning of Church buildings ‘extraordinary attack on Catholic faith’

February 24, 2023

The Archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Farrell, has criticised the inclusion of Church buildings and land under a new residential zoning land tax which is being proposed by Dublin City Council. Speaking to the Irish Independent, the Archbishop described the move as “an extraordinary attack on the Catholic faith”. But is this really the case?

Irish teacher’s religious objection to gender affirmation backed by the science

February 15, 2023

Enoch Burke was originally suspended from his role as a secondary school teacher at Wilson’s Hospital School in Ireland for refusing to recognise a student as having changed their gender rather than their biological sex, and not submitting to an instruction to refer to that student by the pronouns “they/them” and using their new name.

St Brigid: the latest victim of cancel culture in Ireland

January 31, 2023

February 1 marks the feast of St. Brigid in Ireland, a day most people in the country grew up with as the second most-important “Irish” saint’s day, with time spent in school making St Brigid’s crosses from reeds or rushes pulled from the fields that very morning. In more urban areas, where rushes were not

Benedict XVI: how my time as a humanitarian aid worker led me to his writings

December 31, 2022

Reading Ratzinger is a commitment to moving beyond simplistic truisms such as the juxtaposition of charity and justice as a zero-sum game and to seeking to understand the depths of things, to see beyond the natural world into the supernatural, beyond the physical life to the eschatological, beyond the body to the soul, without ever embracing any false dualism but rather interrogating knowledge and life, orthodoxy and praxis, as an integrated whole.

The truth about the Enoch Burke case

September 12, 2022

The story of an Irish teacher being jailed for refusing to comply with a request from his school to refer to a girl using the pronoun ‘they’ and use that person’s new name has received global attention. Although the story is not so straightforward as presented by both his supporters and detractors, the substantive issue

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