Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The presentations gave a rich picture of the problems that exist in RSE. There seems to unanimous agreement that they are there. Mr. Niall Behan raised a really important point about the gender aspect of the impact of inadequate sex education, which falls disproportionately on women. Would he or other witnesses expand on this gendered impact element? Other anecdotal evidence suggests there is a gendered difference in how sex education is delivered. Boys get one form of sex education that, anecdotally, seems to be less in terms of fewer minutes per year or whatever, and which includes very little in terms of consent. Young women probably get more minutes although it is still completely inadequate in terms of time and the gatekeeper model, whereby it is their role not to have improper or unsafe sex, is put on them in particular.

Dr. Aoife Neary raised a really interesting point about the idea of childhood innocence, which is something we hear about a lot around this topic, particularly when we get into the idea of age appropriateness and the idea that sex education can start from as young as three. People say we should not be taking away childhood innocence. It reflects the fact that a section of society sees sexuality as something from which young people should be shielded and as a negative as opposed to its being part of humanity and part of who we are. Could Dr. Neary unpack that a little? What does age-appropriate RSE look like for children at three, five and seven years? Could she demystify this and take away the fears that people have about it?

We got a really good picture of how religious ethos interacts with the curriculum.

A curriculum can be the best in the world on paper but something can then happen. There can either be a board of a school or a principal directing that a certain bit will not really be taught and when another bit is taught, account will be taken of the religious ethos of the school, which can cause direct interference or which can interfere indirectly as the perception of religious ethos or pressure leads to teachers shying away from really going there, even if the curriculum exists on paper. That arose when representatives from the teacher unions came before us. The major issue, as touched on by Ms Donnelly, is that there is a legislative basis for the confusion and contradictory messages of the Department of Education and Skills. The legislative basis is the Education Act 1998, with the reference to having regard to the characteristic spirit of the school. It is quite fundamental and I am interested in the opinions of the witnesses on this. We cannot have progressive, modern, sex-positive RSE without dealing with that. One must deal with that by amending the Education Act. I encourage the committee to try to find time to take the next Stage of the Provision of Objective Sex Education Bill 2018, one purpose of which is precisely to do that.