Dr. Pádraig MacNeela:

I have the privilege of representing NUIG today. I thank the committee members for their interest in the work we are doing at NUIG and at higher education institutions throughout the country to support a culture of active consent among the young adults who are students in our institutions.

I am representing the SMART consent research team, which comprises Dr. Siobhán O'Higgins, Dr. Charlotte McIvor, Kate Dawson, also at NUIG, and me. We work to put together a programme of research and practice in this area. We have developed a programme of consent education and awareness to support ourselves at NUIG and other institutions as well. We work from a definition of active consent. That is a really important definition to clarify. It is about ongoing and freely given verbal or non-verbal communication in respect of any form of sexual activity or intimacy. This also reflects the person's internal sense of willingness. It is quite complex once we delve into it.

We began in 2013, through a collaboration with Rape Crisis Network Ireland, to study people’s understanding of sexual consent. In 2015, we developed that programme into the SMART consent workshop. This is a relatively short workshop. Thinking pragmatically, as we must do in implementation, it lasts between an hour to an hour and a half. We work with students with the help of trained facilitators with a manual and a full framework of support behind them.

Dr. O'Higgins and I have been very active in putting together a training programme. We have trained more than 200 students and staff members as facilitators of consent workshops since 2016. More than 4,000 students have now taken part in a SMART consent workshop in the nine or ten institutions where we have delivered workshops directly or trained people who deliver them within an integrated programme they develop at their institution.

I would like to direct the members' attention to four particular lessons we have learned through the collaboration we have pursued with so many people over the last several years. The first is to offer trainable, high-quality materials within the workshop format. Second, it is important for this to have a home within the institution, for example embedded within student orientation or the curriculum. There must be a place for it to be. Third, to embrace the goal of full awareness and culture change in this area, which includes awareness of sexual violence, consent programmes need to reach out the full community of students. It is not simply about workshops. We are particularly interested in developing a media campaign this year. There seems to be a sense that this is going to be rolled out quite widely and in the long term, we need to think seriously about going beyond the workshop format to embrace a theatre performance-based format. An example of this is the model that is available from several US campuses. A theatre troupe from the US has briefed us on their work in the last few weeks. Finally, this programme has to be made sustainable. It is great to do this work and we have learned a lot, but in the long term this has to be taken on board in institutions' policy frameworks.

It is really important to realise that the definition I have outlined is a positive, active definition of consent. It obviously encompasses all of the issues of non-consent, sexual violence, sexual assault and harassment. However, given where students are coming from and the often quite limited sex education they have received at school, we really have to meet them in a very positive way and work with them in the terms of their young adulthood. They may be experiencing this kind of sexual activity for the first time. Working through a consent workshop must not be perceived as a threatening encounter, but rather a liberating or fun experience students can have with their peers.