Back Issues / 2001

The Irish economic miracle, so totally unexpected, has transformed Ireland from a poor country into an extremely prosperous one. According to The Economist it is ‘the euro’s most successful member’. This transformation should give us great satisfaction as we no longer have to bemoan the high rate of unemployment or the flood of educated young people forced to leave the country in search of work. In this issue of Studies John Sweeney suggests that the transformation is solid and deep and that Ireland will be well capable of withstanding the inevitable external economic shocks.

This issue of Studies presents a feminist view on abortion. It is not presented as the feminist view but a view that many feminists hold to tenaciously despite much opposition from within the feminist movement. Fundamental to the pro-abortion case is the claim that a woman has an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy because she should have the right over her own body and so the right to decide to bring or not to bring a pregnancy to its term. Freedom of choice, however, is not absolute. One has the right to choose only between alternatives that are legally and morally permissible.

“What is Transubstantiation?” was the question asked, rather casually, by a history tutor in one of our best known third level institutions. The tutor was not asking the students to believe in it, or even to give a very accurate definition. All that was sought from the students was some basic idea of what the term meant. Nobody in the tutorial had the remotest idea, so one of the fundamental doctrines of the majority church in Ireland and one of the greatest causes of dispute among western Christians at the time of the Reformation has been erased from common awareness.

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