Those caught in this situation are often too unwell to stand trial, condemned to spend an indeterminate time in an overcrowded prison. Prisons, which have a deleterious effect on those with stable mental health, exacerbate the rapid fraying of a person’s mind. It is not too much to draw an equivalence to torture.

The turning of the year prompts us to look back and look forward. In JCFJ in 2025 we were delighted to deliver a special issue of Working Notes dedicated to marking the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ groundbreaking Laudato Si’ and to follow that up with an issue focusing on the ethical and policy dimensions… Read more »

In October 2022, two young people from the environmental activist group, Just Stop Oil, walked into the National Gallery in London carrying tins of soup. They opened one tin and hurled it over the glass protecting Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting Sunflowers. The painting itself was unharmed. The seventeenth-century Italian frame was splashed. It needed some… Read more »

All our prisons are doing is “warehousing” drug users and releasing them again, thereby ensuring that many will return to using drugs and back into prison. 

If a more populist right Government, than the incumbent coalition, were to emerge in Ireland, then they have an arsenal of tools to further suppress peaceful democratic protest and respond punitively to protestors.

A Presbyterian Appreciation of Pope Francis Sometimes people ask me how I ended up directing a Jesuit social research centre, as a Presbyterian theologian. At this stage, the polite answer rolls out of my mouth with barely any thinking required.  But if I was to tell the truth, I would have to say that it… Read more »

On 13th March 2025, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice welcomed Dr Geertjan Zuijdwegt—criminologist and theologian at KU Leuven—for an expert seminar on small-scale detention and the Belgian experience of implementing this modality of punishment.

Forced to take an indirect route to work or a night out because of “no-go” streets. Hurriedly crossing the road due to serial law-breaking and aggressive behaviour. Speeding up on your bicycle as a “single male” aggressively follows. Children unable to go to school on their own—even the shortest distance—without needing to be delivered to the school gate in the parental car.

A new prison at Thornton Hall was a bad idea in 2005, and it still remains so.

The year draws to a close and the Irish people anticipate that when the Dáil sits again in January, a new government will form. It will mostly be the same as the old one, albeit lacking a strong environmental concern after the electoral wipe-out suffered by the Green party. The results of the General Election… Read more »