Are database triggers a bad idea?

In my experience they are evil, because they can result in surprising side effects, and are difficult to debug (especially when one trigger fires another). Often developers do not even think of looking if there is a trigger.

On the other hand, it seems like if you have logic that must occur evertime a new FOO is created in the database then the most foolproof place to put it is an insert trigger on the FOO table.

The only time we're using triggers is for really simple things like setting the ModifiedDate.