Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

On Saturday, tens of thousands of people will fill the streets of Dublin celebrating Pride. We will be celebrating marriage equality, the belated apology for criminalisation, the role the LGBTQ+ community continues to play in driving progressive change, illustrated by the 91% who voted for repeal. Pride will also be a protest for trans healthcare, for the immediate roll-out of pre-exposure prophylaxis, PrEP, by the HSE, for action to ensure all families can be recognised as such on their children’s birth certificates.

I will focus on the thousands who will be carrying placards saying "Teach don’t preach, don’t block the sex ed Bill." In most of our schools right now LGBTQ+ people are erased. Their sexual health and relationships do not feature. What is provided is heteronormative and gender normative sex education where only reproductive intercourse is mentioned and where trans people and non-binary people simply do not exist.

We have been inundated with school students contacting us about their inadequate sex education. Courtney told us that her education "only focused on heterosexual relationships. They mentioned bisexuals once when they asked did we think they were greedy." Eighty seven per cent of school students surveyed felt that LGBTQ+ relationships were not discussed sufficiently in their RSE. That is because of an outdated curriculum but fundamentally it is because of church control of our schools, and the religious ethos of those schools taking precedence over the rights of students to have access to necessary information. That religious ethos provision in the Education Act 1998 will stand in the way of even the best curriculum in the world being delivered to school students. It is yet another illustration of why we need separation of church and State.

The impact of this on the mental health of young people is obvious. Where they are erased or othered, it contributes to an atmosphere where bullying is more likely, where young people feel pressured to hide to their identity and, shockingly, according to one study, where one in three young LGBT people has attempted to take their life. We need factual progressive sex education, which is LGBTQ+ positive, not gender normative and which centres consent. That is what the Citizens' Assembly called for. It is what the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution recommended and the Dáil voted for in April when it passed Second Stage of the Objective Sex Education Bill 2018. Crucially, that Bill would amend the Education Act to ensure that it would be delivered regardless of the religious ethos of the school. Despite that vote, however, we have a problem. The Ceann Comhairle has decided that the Bill would require incidental expenses and, therefore, to proceed to Committee Stage, we need the Taoiseach to sign a money message. I presume he will be there on Saturday. Will he be able to tell the crowd that he is allowing this Bill to continue to Committee Stage so that we can have necessary LGBTQ+ positive sex education in our schools, or will he have to explain why he is undemocratically using a money message to block the Bill and standing in the way of the change we need?

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