Speaking on RTÉ Radio One this morning Senator Ivana Bacik said she had approached Catholic primary schools in Dublin and asked them to give up their Catholic ethos and become multi-denominational. Quite rightly the schools refused to take such a unilateral step that would deprive Catholic parents of the right to choose a Catholic school for their children.

I’ve been following the coverage of the Tracey Fay case with interest, wondering when someone will call for a social worker to be held accountable. If 23 children in 10 years had died while in the care of the Church the uproar would be so loud and so intense it would be heard in Antarctica.

I wonder what the reaction to Sinead O'Connor's kind offer to help Jesus burn down the Vatican would have been if she had offered to help burn down Cairo's Grand Mosque instead, or attack Mecca? In the days and weeks and months following 9/11, anti-Muslim feelings were high, but every effort was made by the media not to fan the flames of those feelings.

Protesters from the Amnesty International organisation staged a so-called “die in” in London today to highlight the number of women who die in childbirth around the world.

A spokeswoman said: “Global figures show that approximately one woman dies every minute because of preventable causes related to pregnancy.”

Some 28,000 aggressive secularists have signed a petition for Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown calling on him to make the Church pay for Pope Benedict’s planned state visit to Britain later this month.

The secularists, who claim to want a pluralist society, object to the fact that the tax-payer if footing the bill for security and related protocol that surrounds a visit by any Head of State.