Diocese celebrates the family
BISHOP of Kerry Ray Browne has hit out at the severe housing and financial difficulties assailing young Irish people as ‘anti-marriage and anti-family’– in one of his most fortright statements yet during an address to a special diocesan assembly celebrating the theme of the family.
Held in the Brandon Hotel, Tralee, on Sunday, it saw more than 300 delegates from all over the county attend; the majority of them clergy, members of parish pastoral councils, liturgy groups, youth ministers, parish secretaries and sacristans.
Keynote speaker was Dr Dan O’Connell, lecturer at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick and the co-author of the new religious programme in primaries.
Bishop Browne made an urgent appeal to Government in the course of his address, meanwhile: “At present young couples have enormous difficulties: young couples who are committed to each other, and getting married, and want to be in a financial position to have their own home and to start a family.
“For so many of them, their wages are poor, income tax is high and financially they cannot afford a house and to start a family...This situation is much worse where their work is paid at the minimum wage. Even then it can be a matter of part-time hours... How can we treat our own people like that? Is not that situation anti-marriage, anti-family, ‘anti’ these most basic of human rights?”
The Bishop said that Government needs to ‘find a better way...in order that every young couple can make an ordinary life for themselves.”