Breda O'Brien

Pro-lifers are sometimes accused of only caring about children up to the moment of birth. Irish society in general doesn’t seem to care too much for children after birth

Voters don’t tend to consider a politician’s age, otherwise how to explain the appeal of Bernie Sanders and Michael D Higgins to the young?

Important distinction to be made between adjustments to assessment process and those made after to marking

Children have more autonomy about what they eat or wear, but less independence in real terms

The Church’s ongoing failure to acknowledge fully the harm caused by sexual abuse continues to overshadow everything

There are spoilers for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie here, so don't read until you've dressed in pink and gone to see it

The Chosen has good production values and was completed despite Hollywood’s blind spot for faith-based drama

While the country is convulsed with events at RTÉ, a far bigger scandal has passed by without due attention

After the deaths of two St Michael’s College students in separate incidents in Greece, their friends and school community are grappling with the jagged sense of lives cut off too soon

Breda O’Brien: It is hard for those with a self-image of being radicals to realise that they are now the establishment

Breda O’Brien: Even when people are trying to be scrupulously fair, it is virtually impossible to be free of the conditioning of an influential elite

Parents are intervening too quickly to solve their teenagers’ problems. Not every squabble is about bullying

We should be thankful people still want to be teachers, instead of making it almost impossible for them to live while training

Breda O’Brien: The real headline is not the decline of Catholicism but the subtle and not-so-subtle ways our society is being shaped by the object of veneration that is replacing it - capitalism

Breda O’Brien: There should be more to life than being manipulated by algorithms to consume more