Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I confirm that I am on the grounds of Leinster House. I am late on in the debate so a lot of the ground has been covered already. I draw attention to what Ms O'Malley said about compassion. That is central to all of this. Dr. Hayes referred to labelling. We have to at all times be conscious of our language. When we talk about this, we should talk about bullying behaviour. We should talk about the behaviour rather than the child.

In a lot of this, self-esteem is the silver bullet. I knew very few children in my teaching life who had good self-esteem and engaged in bullying behaviour. We have to look at causes and at mitigating the effects of bullying. When we talk about culture, upstanders and bystanders, we are talking about mitigating the effects of bullying. If we are going to the root cause, we should be looking at the child who engages in bullying behaviour.

I am struck by Dr. Noctor's phrase in his opening that culture is the greatest ally. It made me think of the famous Peter Drucker quote that culture eats strategy for breakfast. As Dr. Noctor stated, one can have all the signs in the world on the school gate but if the culture is not right in the school, strategy counts for nothing.

I draw attention to the atomisation in schools, particularly primary schools. The child's reality is set within the four walls of the primary school class. It is difficult to share culture even between classrooms and between teachers. In Dr. Muldoon's opening piece, he talked about information-sharing between schools and I do not think that happens enough. We certainly do not have a formalised enough process to allow that to happen whereby we could share the experience of what went well and what went less well. I think of Ms O'Malley's example of the three schools that are geographically close but that have such different school cultures. How do we share that experience? How does one school learn from another how to culture-set in the right way?

My question is directed to Dr. Muldoon because three minutes was very short for his opening statement. He mentioned two things in particular. The first was the Department's anti-bullying procedures which date from 2013 and which he believes should be updated. I agree with him. Second, the Youth Mental Health Pathfinder Project commenced five years ago but has not been implemented. I want to give him the opportunity to expand on those a little bit and tell us how important they are for the work of this committee.