Ms Rachel O'Connor:

I absolutely agree in terms of the procedures. They should be updated. It would be great to include homophobic and transphobic bullying, as well as bullying based on disabilities and on socioeconomic backgrounds. We see much of that. In a school like mine, there is a full spectrum of economic backgrounds, of abilities and of disabilities. It is important that awareness is created in that space, too. We should go back to basics on the use of derogatory language among our teenagers, such as calling people “gay”, or “a bender” and other really horrible derogatory terms that are used on a daily basis in the yard. We should go back to zero tolerance on that. We should almost retrain the vernacular of our teenagers. This is an important piece of this. It is a good and simple place to start to create awareness.

When the new guidelines, Children First, were launched, every teacher in the country had to complete a professional development service for teachers, PDST, and a Tusla e-learning course. There is no reason that the PDST cannot be mandated to do a "bullying first", bullying intervention, or bullying awareness programme, whereby before coming back to school, every teacher in the country would have to sit down for an hour or two to complete an online e-learning course. Then we would be well on the way to creating awareness and to putting it back into schools and staff rooms, so that we can start having conversations about the impact of bullying. We have to name it to tame it. If we do not know about it, we cannot do anything about it. It is timely to do simple, actionable things to create awareness around this important topic. I would very much welcome the intervention of a pilot programme.