Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate Deputy Ruth Coppinger on the Bill. In its simplicity, it does what we have needed for a long time in the State. The Bill complements the campaign to repeal the eighth amendment. All of us who were engaged in the process of watching and learning from the Citizens' Assembly and who were engaged in the Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution will be aware that one of the strong recommendations from that process, which is connected to the question of crisis and unwanted pregnancy, is the question of non-ethos founded, factually based sex education in our schools. Sex education has been mandatory in Ireland for the past 30 years. It is a crucial element in fertility control and sex control. Research confirms that in Ireland and elsewhere, those who have received proper, factual sex education are more likely to use contraception, more likely to be clean of sexually transmitted diseases and are less likely to experience crisis pregnancies in their teenage years and often later in life. The contribution this measure could make to improving sexual and reproductive health in Irish society will be enormous.

What was formerly called the crisis pregnancy agency of the HSE commissioned research in this area some time ago but it needs to be updated. Much more is needed, particularly from the Department of Education and Skills, not just from the Department of Health.

Sex education works. It could work much better if it was better. We learnt from the deliberations of the Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution that in Holland age-appropriate sex education was made compulsory from the age of ten in 2012. Between 2012 and 2016, statistics show that crisis pregnancies in teenagers decreased by 30%. It is quite a startling result. Considering that change in terms of crisis pregnancy, one could extrapolate that a similar result would be shown in the health of relationships, the issue of consent and the question of how young people deal with their sexuality and the issues surrounding it. If one was to extrapolate from the figures in Holland, at least 5,000 or so crisis pregnancies could be avoided in Ireland every year if we were to deal with sexual education in a correct way. It would also curtail the rising levels of sexually transmitted diseases among young people. I learnt today from a group that represents the LGBT+ community that the biggest rise in HIV among men is in teenage young men who are not being educated about protection or about their own sexuality and who face the sort of mental and personal crises Deputy Paul Murphy has talked about.

As has been pointed out, the school ethos trumps all other considerations in the delivery of sex education. The delivery of the relationships and sexuality education, RSE, programme, as it is called, to students at both post-primary and primary level is trumped by the consideration of the school ethos. The RSE programme has been described as too little, too late. Age-appropriateness has been determined largely by the Catholic Church and very little of the primary school programme prepares children for their approaching adolescence and its challenges. At post-primary level, the situation gets even worse, with some of the most vulnerable children, such as early school leavers, missing out on lessons that deal with aspects of RSE most relevant to their needs because such lessons are delayed until the final year.

As a community activist, I can tell the Minister the best sex education is delivered by youth groups in the community. The numbers of young people who go through that service are much more limited than the numbers of young people who go through schools. Most youth services capture the children most at risk, but not all of them. A very limited number of young people get the delivery of proper sex education through the youth services which includes discussion and non-ethos based, factual, biologically correct education. Hats off to the youth services and youth workers who deliver those services in the community. Children with special needs, as a result of disability and challenging behaviours, or children from ethnic minorities, Traveller backgrounds or new communities are very poorly catered for in our system. A very worrying aspect of RSE particularly at post-primary level is that it is contracted out, often to visitor or outside facilitators. The vast majority are from agencies run by or strongly associated with the Catholic Church. When asked at the committee about what regulation the Department imposes on these agencies, we were told by the Department official, Ms Emer Egan:

There is no regulation of such agencies. If an agency has an approach inconsistent with good educational practice and at variance with the policy of a school, the school should not engage it.

The Department does not regulate them. That is quite a shocking fact.

There is very little monitoring or evaluation of what these visitors do in the classroom in practice and there is no national audit of the extent to which they are used or how effective they are. The limited research available indicates around 40% of our schools use them and in some schools, particularly at senior level, 90% of RSE classes are given by outside facilitators or visitors, most of them with a strong Catholic ethos.

The challenges facing our children as they try to develop a healthy attitude to sex and relationships are enormous, particularly in the age of online pornography, sexual predators and widespread misogyny, as has been witnessed in the #MeToo campaign and the recent Belfast rape trial which has brought an admission from young people that they are faced with misogynistic attitudes daily and do not know how to handle them because they are not being educated properly and factually to deal with sex and sexuality.

Our children need and deserve the best preparation for adult life and they are very unlikely to receive it from an institution that has historically shown more concern for its own institutional power than for the children over whom it wielded that power. As Deputy Paul Murphy said, it is about time we stopped paying lip service to this and saw it though to the end so that we have full, proper, non-ethos based education for all children in all our schools and that sex education is made compulsory, as it has been in other European countries. We do not have to look very far for this. Results in Britain, where sex education was made compulsory from an early age in 2012, and in the Netherlands show the positive outcomes when it is removed from an ethos-based system and delivered to children at appropriate levels and appropriate ages and when it is inclusive of all gender and sexual preferences.

It is amazing we are even having this frank conversation in this House and God be with the days one would not be able to say the word "sex" in Dáil Éireann. The fact that we can have this open discussion is a tribute to the Bill and to Deputy Coppinger for bringing it forward. I appeal to the Minister and the Cabinet to see this through as soon as possible and stop delaying giving our children what they deserve.

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