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The Catholic Church, the State and Society in Independent Ireland, 1922-2022

Irish women challenged the patriarchal nature of Irish society and traditional Church teaching on birth control and on the natural role of woman as mother and home-maker. Inglis contends that the Irish mother played a vital role in the development and transmission of Irish Catholicism from generation to generation. Once women were able to access alternative sources of power through the workplace and public life, a key pillar of the Church’s ideological control was removed.

 

How I[reland] Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Prison

The distinction of the Irish pastoral penal policy was, first, the prisoner was viewed not as a defective person with skewed attitude and amoral values. Instead, they were understood as someone who most likely had fallen on hard times, crime was seen as a result of poverty and a lack of opportunity, which was felt to be endemic in Ireland. There was empathy with the prisoner.

 

100 Years of Irish Housing

Housing ownership in Ireland has bestowed an enduring set of values. But if there is any lesson from 100 years of Irish housing it is that housing policy can diminish, or it can reinforce, social and economic inequality.

 

Editorial

  2021 marks the centenary of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It is an apt moment to take stock of the history of policies pursued in the State since then, focusing particularly on the areas that comprise the core of our work in the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. We begin with a… Read more »

 

Modern Monetary Theory and State Finances: A Recipe for Progress?

The central idea of MMT is that countries that issue their own currency are not financially constrained. This is because a government in control of its currency can simply ‘print’ new money to finance its spending. In today’s world, printing money does not mean opening up the printing presses, but rather is about creating money electronically at the click of a mouse. In its purest form, the central bank simply credits or increases the bank account of the government, which is then free to spend.

 

False Accounting: Why We Shouldn’t ask People Who Commit Crimes to Pay their Debts to Society

It does not work to replace ‘paying your debts’ with ‘repairing the harm’, then. Drawing on the work of penal theorist Antony Duff, we suggest the metaphor of “fulfilling a civic obligation” as an alternative tool to guide our responses to crime. Duff argues that, done very differently, “criminal punishment could and should be inclusionary, as something we can do, not to a ‘them’ who are implicitly excluded from the (law-abiding) community of citizens, but to ourselves as full, if imperfect, members of that community.”[15]

 

The Consequences of a Bankrupt God

Theology turns out to have something significant to say to our young student and to society more widely. It can help us discover that there are ways to get at the injustice of an indebted society that predate Marx and his many descendants.

 

The Bramble Cay Melomys

The Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola), is also known as the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat. On Earth, there are over 2,200 rodent species comprising about 40 per cent of all mammal species. What’s one rat?

 

Debt Addicts

Debt creates an interdependent relationship between the creditor and the debtor, until the alienation of the latter from the former. Like an addiction, it can lead to alienation from one’s own body.

 

Do You Always Have to Pay Your Debts?

It is not only when debt is contracted that the ethical dimension is involved, it is throughout the repayment process. The debtor and the lender are not equal. It is not, as we say in economics, a zero sum game. The creditor expects his money to be profitable and to earn interest.