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

The first meeting of the Joint Committee on Autism is happening today, so I apologise that I have to take off early.

I am delighted to see so many sustainable development goal badges on people around the committee room. It is an agenda that I feel strongly about, so I am delighted to see that it is represented in this social enterprise. While it is not strictly related to social enterprise, it is being marked out by the EU as an area where there is an opportunity for growth and to reinterpret our economic growth in a way that decouples us from emissions.

Our guests' work is inspiring. I am reminded very much about a debate that was held in the Dáil on Thursday.

Deputy Pringle brought forward a Bill on lowering the voting age to 16. There was a cross-party consensus that this is something that needs to be looked at. If we look at the work that the students from Coláiste Bhríde are producing it shows that they are politically engaged and that they are thoughtful about that political engagement. They are more than capable of being able to exercise a franchise and of deciding who they should be voting for to represent them. If we lowered the voting age to 16 that would have an impact on the manifestos of all parties in taking the concerns of young people more seriously and in putting them at the heart of politics going forward.

I am also reminded of an experiment I ran a long time ago when I was a teacher. I was teaching sixth class and I asked my pupils to cut out images from newspapers. We made four columns. One was if you were in a newspaper for doing something and the other was if you were in the newspaper for looking a certain way. We did that for images of men and women. It was incredibly striking when we saw how many men were in the newspaper for doing something and how many women were in it for looking a particular way. From what our guests are saying, that is not as stark a male and female issue as it was. Instagram and its influencers have changed that. Boys and men are increasingly coming under the same pressure to look a certain way that was more often associated with girls and women in the past, albeit that was not right.

I would like our guests to tell me more about the discussion. Achieving a consensus in a group of 22 people is not at all easy. In that context, I would like them to talk to me about the process of how they arrived at that notion with the class group. It sounds brilliant, and I will have to go away and have a look at the Norwegian legislation to see how easily it could be transposed to an Irish context but what were the other issues. Our guests spent a lot of time teasing through the issues that affect people of their age within a particular context. The school is at the border with Wicklow so it might be different from what students in a Dublin school, or a Waterford school in my context, would be thinking about. Can our guests give me an overview of what other issues came close to the mark in what they were hoping to take on? Did they see any projects from other schools that they thought were interesting and inspiring?