Dr. Brian Gormley:

I thank the committee for the invitation to attend today's session to contribute to the discussion on this important issue. DIT considers the area of sexual consent to be deeply connected to positive student engagement and gender equality, and we welcome the focus on this matter nationally.

In DIT, and, more specifically, in campus life, our aim is to deliver the best student experience to the 20,000 students in the institute. We provide free healthcare, counselling, pastoral care services, career development, accommodation support, financial aid and learning support, as well as sports, societies and volunteering activities to our students. We work in close partnership with our students' union, and I wish to acknowledge the work carried out by the students' union around the area of sexual consent in DIT.

DIT prides itself on serving a diverse range of students, including mature students, students with disabilities and international students. We serve full-time and part-time students and those undertaking continuing professional development. Our students undertake courses ranging from apprenticeship and undergraduate degree programmes to PhD research.

In the campus life office, primarily through our counselling and health services, we see the impact sexual violence and unwanted sexual contact can have on students. We are working hard to develop a proactive effective approach to tackling the issue. Our aims are to introduce a positive change of culture, to develop a more respectful community, to educate students and staff around consent and to ensure that our policies and procedures can be used effectively to support and protect all our students.

This year for the first time a short video on consent was delivered at our orientation to all our incoming undergraduate students, over 4,000 of whom commenced in DIT this year. However, we recognise the need for a more in-depth approach.

As with many of my peers across the higher education sector I do not have any specific expertise or qualifications in the area of sexual consent, sexual violence or harassment. As such, we rely on the research and outputs of projects such as the NUI Galway SMART consent project and the ending sexual harassment and violence in third level education, ESHTE, project of which DIT is an active participant. We expect the outputs of the ESHTE project will be delivered over the coming months.

We have discussed the need for more comprehensive training. We are examining the effectiveness of voluntary versus mandatory training and the impact each approach would have on resources. In our submission we set out some recommendations and I would be glad to discuss any of our recommendations or comments afterwards. We hope these recommendations will be a useful contribution to the discussion. In particular, the institute would welcome a national framework and guidelines on how to positively promote consent, and, in particular, guidelines on how to effectively manage allegations of sexual assault between students who may be in the same programme or accommodation block. I thank the committee for the opportunity to contribute and I look forward to discussing the matter further.