Joe O'Toole (Independent)

Senator Norris and myself sat on these benches for debates on an issue Senator Norris has raised three or four times in the past month, that is, the equal status legislation. We have a system where the people who are responsible, the same orders who have not put more money into the kitty, are running schools and hospitals and even if they do not work in the schools or hospitals they decide the teachers and the consultants who get the jobs, with their views being brought to bear on that.

When the Stay Safe sex education programme was being brought forward I was not in Dublin. My three teenage daughters were at home on their own. We live out in the country. I got a call from them and they were hysterical because there was a crowd of weird people picketing our bungalow out in the country. One can imagine the words on the placards, and they were shoving various pictures, imagery and items in bottles at my three daughters. I rang the local gardaí because I could not get back home in time and they went out to my home and put order in the place. They told me who the groups were — Family Solidarity, Youth Defence and three or four others, all people that we knew.

Nobody gave children a chance. When it came to dealing with the issue of mandatory reporting in this House a new concept was discovered. Who remembers the great concept of false memory that was developed by those right-wing Catholic organisations? The way it was proved that children should not be believed was by telling them that what they remembered was not true. Those organisations brought right-wing experts from America here to preach around Ireland that this was false memory, that it was put into the children's heads and that it never happened in all these incidences. I dealt with these issues here on the floor of this House, in my job as the chief executive officer of the INTO and in various other places in life and it is unfair that it should go on.

On the equal status legislation, we fought in this House for what we wanted and did not want in that legislation. It is only right that if Catholic parents want their children to have a Catholic education, they should have an entitlement to that. There should be no problem with that. It is only right that if somebody working in that context tries to undermine that particular ethos, they should have no place there but they were not happy with that. They did not want to wait for any such approval. If they did not like somebody's colour, their sexual orientation or views they might have offered elsewhere, they felt they should not be given the job. We have put into our legislation the right to discriminate in the most unfair way on a ground which should never be accepted.