Mr. Des Hogan:

I will call on my colleague, Ms Joyce, to respond to some of the questions shortly. Deputy McConalogue asked about engagement with the Minister. We wrote to the Minister twice and to the NCCA. We would like to have had more engagement with the Minister. As a statutory body, we are there to provide advice to the Government on best practice and how to meet its international and constitutional obligations. We are also called upon internationally, before UN committees, to give our independent assessment as to how the State is doing. We have a kind of bridging role and see ourselves as providing advice, to Government primarily, to ensure we are not criticised internationally.

As we heard in regard to PE, we need to think about what sort of society we are trying to develop. CSPE introduces students to a variety of areas - equality, human rights, democracy, inclusiveness, diversity, tolerance, and so forth - areas they would not ordinarily cover. We had a very successful action project last year. We also had a folder exhibition, which was launched by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Deputy Frances Fitzgerald. Quite a number of the contributions from students talked about how the issue of human rights affects them in their local area, issues such as the right to be safe, the right to own property and issues we do not normally associate with this area. CSPE opens up these issues and, with increasing diversity in schools, it allows for discussion of the sort of person we want children to become. Do we want them to understand about homophobic bullying, Traveller inclusiveness or same-sex inclusiveness? Do we want them to develop a tolerance and understanding and embracing of diversity or do we want to have students who do not understand or who have never come across these concepts? This is the core question for us. If we do not make CSPE compulsory, these issues will not be a compulsory part of the curriculum. If I was a member of a UN committee and asking questions of Ireland, I would be asking it to show me what it had done and how it had replaced one thing with another and made the system better.