Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Sex education is a very important element of a child's life. It is critical for their understanding of themselves and their physical and mental health. It is also critical for their reproductive lives and for the foundation of the next generation. Sex and sexuality is a powerful and positive element in people's lives but can also be phenomenally challenging, especially for young people. Education around consent, respect and commitment are critical and sexual behaviour without consent and respect is extremely damaging, dangerous and criminal.

Many parents are wonderful when it comes to sex education and many provide an open space for discourse and debate around the issue. However, the truth is many parents are not and many have difficulties with regard to giving sex education to their own children. I believe that, as a society, we need to do a lot more to help parents be in a position to be open, honest, factual and informative with regard to sex education in their own families.

Every citizen in Ireland must be able to be who they are, everybody must be able to reach their full potential, without fear or favour, and everybody, no matter what their background, must be able to see themselves in the education they receive. However, Ireland was an extremely uniform place in the past. There were expected norms and moralities and there was no tolerance at all for people who stepped outside of these norms. Indeed, the law and stigma was used to control people and their behaviour and people were kept inside those accepted norms.

That uniformity was extremely dangerous and damaging to so many people and we need to be careful we do not repeat it. We should seek to live in a pluralist society where the diversity of everybody is welcomed and respected. Diversity is a two-way street. It would be a massive mistake to go down the route of uniformity with regard to ethos in sex education. It would be a massive mistake to remove parental choice with regard to the type of ethos that is taught to children. Parents should be able to raise their children within their own values and ethos. Forcing one value system on all parents, a mandatory ethos against the wishes of parents and children, would simply seek to replace the stifling uniformity of the past with the reverse now.

The Catholic Church should not determine the ethos of the sex education of all the children in Irish society but neither should Deputy Ruth Coppinger. Deputy Coppinger should be able to send her children to a school that represents her particular ethos but people who radically disagree with Deputy Coppinger should also be able to find a school that reflects their own ethos with regard to education.

Fact-based information with regard to sex and sexuality must be given to children. The diversity of Ireland's ethos should not be erased. We should not seek to replace one marginalised group with another marginalised group. There are different value systems in Ireland. They should be allowed to coexist respectfully and we should not be seeking to force one value system on top of another. Where feasible, we should be able to have Catholic schools, Protestant schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools, non-denominational schools and schools for atheists and agnostic children. We must ensure that pluralism is still at the heart of our education systems. Parents must be able to select what is best for their children. A mandatory, uniform proposal is likely to meet with great resistance among parents right across the country.

The Minister mentioned young people have access to highly sexualised material at a very young age. It is true that access to highly sexualised material on the Internet is currently rampant for very young children. Indeed, many studies and much work has been done which indicates that this type of access can be a very damaging element with regard to young children's understanding of their own sexuality and sex. It can even be an ingredient in sexual violence in the future. This was brought into the public domain in a really shocking manner recently when we saw the horrific murder and sexual assault of a young girl by two boys.

We know there is a radical need to deal with this. At the time, the Taoiseach said that something should be done and he referenced the fact that Britain has decided to make it illegal for children under the age of 18 to access highly sexualised pornography. However, there is nothing else happening with regard to the Government attitude towards this and there is no energy whatsoever with regard to trying to tackle it. I encourage the Government to have a focus on trying to sort out this issue. Children as young as ten and 11 should not have access to this type of material. I encourage the Minister to influence his colleagues at Cabinet level to see whether we can actually bring about a situation where children are able to enjoy their childhood.

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