Ms Noeline Blackwell:

I will be brief. I want to touch on two matters raised by Senator Higgins. One was in relation to tribunals. It is an important reminder that it is not only courts where people are traumatised in giving their evidence. The Senator mentioned refugee tribunals. One will also find the same in work tribunals where people have been victims of sexual harassment. This is really important. The International Protection Office, for instance, is getting training from our training team in a trauma-informed approach and understanding the impact of trauma on memory in regard to asylum claims. That kind of training, which is also happening in the Judicial Council, is really valuable. It needs to be consistent and continued because it is quite valuable.

The other point I would make is that Senator Higgins's point about capacity should be made as often as one can. If this committee is going to do good work, if the current reforms are going to do good work and if the strategy is going to good work, we will not see a reduction in the need for our services or the services of our colleagues around the country. We will see an enhanced need for them, which will increase our obligations and our need to help people. Yes, we will need extra funding for that but we also need upscaling in so many ways to deal with what we hope will be an exponential growth in people being able to access our services. We put in something in our submission in respect of the third national strategy. We need the equivalent of Enterprise Ireland to allow us to have resources, the general management, communication, and analysis resources that we have never been given in a sector that has always been scraping the ground in terms of resources. Money is important but it will not be everything.

To respond briefly to Deputy McAuliffe, what he articulated is what we hear consistently, that is, how worried people, teachers, schools and parents are about the lack of emotional frameworks that are given to young people to help them navigate the world they live in. There is a real challenge in this regard to the Department of Education and a curriculum, including recommendations made for changing curriculum that have sat there since 2019 without being implemented across this area. The Department of Education has not, in our view, taken on board what it needs to do. The truth is, we do not have the language in Ireland. Our teachers do not have the language. Our parents do not have the concepts. Nobody has the understanding in order to help our young people navigate a world in which they are mainly depending on their smartphones and peers for information. On their smartphones they are getting pornography, including hard abuse pornography.

There is a huge piece of work to be done on this. I believe it is a breach of children's rights not to be given the emotional formation they need in our formal education system, as well as more informally. There are over 40 groups like our BodyRight programme out there. It is a matter of discretion what a school gets in. It is a matter of discretion what schools do. I know that, after the very tragic death of Ashling Murphy, teachers were coming to us in absolute despair, particularly teachers of boys, about what they were going to do to talk about this. They had to say something but did not know what to say, how to say it or how to keep a conversation going. It definitely has not been addressed.