Dr. P?draig MacNeela:

One response to the Senator's point would be our partners in consent education, where they are working with Pavee Point. They have been on a journey with them with the programme that began in Galway five years ago or more. That has progressed into what they now call consent education. It was integral for them to work with Pavee Point to figure out how to take this material and make sure it is culturally relevant. There are examples like that. That is why we are saying we need to share all of this kind of best practice. We would rather be working with consent education on the difficulties rather than having every group work individually. There is great learning taking place with groups like that and we need to be able to share and understand how we do that.

Cultural diversity more broadly is something that comes into the university context because there such an emphasis now in colleges on international students. That is something we have looked at in our international student programming. We have asked ourselves if we should be taking the same materials and just adopting them so they are more culturally relevant or if people from different cultures need to have different types of programming. We have come to the conclusion that we just need to work harder to make it more inclusive and have the one voice and one message.

That gets us to think and reflect critically, so it is a good journey to be on. Ms McGrath has probably seen how diversity and inclusion are being considered in further education.