Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank our guests for contributing to this somewhat emotional committee hearing. I know someone who has said their experiences would have been different if they had been given this information when they were younger. Two years after I left school, I was the victim of a sexual assault. It took me five years to realise what consent was. After I watched an RTÉ documentary called "Asking For It?" around that time, it became clearer than ever to me that my response to a life experience would have been much different if I had been equipped with the knowledge to realise that the experience in question was not consensual. I am not alone in this regard because we know that 500 new cases of HIV are being detected alongside consent.

The question I would like to put to Ms Griffith is like the one that was asked by Deputy Hildegarde Naughton. Almost ten years have passed since I left school. Has the education system improved for LGBT young people during that time?

I would like to speak about the impact of the absence of role models and frames of reference for LGBT people. There can be issues of trust with a teacher or a parent who is not a frame of reference for a gay young man, as I was. I suggest that we cannot truly empower or reach LGBT young people with inclusive sex education that is a two-way street between the teacher and the pupil until we redefine the social code entirely. Can that be done? Can we reach LGBT young people through education reform alone? Can we deal with this through a vision for safe schools? Does the social code, which is essentially repressive to us all, need to be redefined entirely? The upcoming referendum is a perfect example of that.