Mr. Ben Holmes:

If I may, I would like to come in here. I know I am very young and you might think that maybe I would not be able to speak on this but as a young person in Ireland today I know that Ireland is evolving very rapidly and many young people would not consider themselves practising Catholics. There have been different stages of secularising by the Government in the last few decades as people of other religions have joined the country and as people have left the Catholic faith or it has had less influence. I wholeheartedly agree that the love your neighbour principle should be something that schools promote. I think people's main gripe with the church becoming involved in education is around certain opinions it might hold on exclusion, sex education and LGBTQ+ people. While the love your neighbour principle is great, that is not the only thing that the Catholic Church might promote. We cannot necessarily say that what the Catholic Church promotes is always positive. When it comes to things where it excludes education on same-sex couples, comprehensive education around sexuality and sex education, that is where it becomes a problem. If the rest of the Government and society as a whole are quite secularist, I do not see why our education could not reflect that.