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

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion.

There has been much talk about watershed moments and I agree that this moment has the potential to be a watershed moment. It can and must be a watershed moment. What struck me last week, attending the vigil outside the Dáil, is that often you go to large assemblies that are powerful partly because people are shouting and making noise, but what was so powerful about the vigil last week was the silence. There was a profound, long silence as people flooded up. There must have been 10,000 people in front of the Dáil on an evening after work. It was a silence which was pregnant with, obviously, a deep sorrow for Ashling Murphy and for the 244 women who have been killed by men since 1996, with compassion for Ashling's family, friends and wider community, but also with anger at a society that perpetuates the sexism and misogyny which allows this sort of violence by men against women to persist and continue over and over. The same thing struck me in Tallaght later that evening, and it was replicated across the country by tens of thousands of people who really have the potential to force a change on this issue. The bottom line is that it is past time to recognise that violence against women - as it is often referred to - is perpetuated by men, and that it is men and the unequal economic and social structures and power dynamics of capitalism that perpetuate male dominance over women. This will have to change if we are to end the scourge of male violence against women.

I will focus in my remaining time on one aspect, which is the question of objective sex education. If we cannot start by teaching children in an age-appropriate way at primary and secondary school basic objective sex education in a factual, consent-based and focused LGBTQ+ positive manner, we really are not going anywhere. If we are ever to have a chance of changing the misogynistic and sexist attitudes that perpetuate male violence, we need to have objective sex education. The Bill, proposed by Solidarity People Before Profit four years ago, was passed on Second Stage and since then it has languished in the Bermuda triangle between Second Stage and Committee Stage. Since then, the Catholic bishops have come out.

They have come out with a new syllabus saying that the church's teaching on marriage between a man and a woman cannot be omitted when discussing LGBT issues. The then Minister, Deputy McHugh, said the ethos of the school is central to any curriculum. Earlier, the Taoiseach responded very positively to Deputy Bríd Smith's question, which is welcome, saying that we need to deal with that, but then he suggested the main issue was to check the training of teachers. The central issue is the ethos. If we do not challenge the fact that the ethos can stand in the way of the delivery of objective sex education, we could have the best curriculum in the world and the best training of teachers in the world but we could not guarantee that people will get the objective sex education that they need to get.

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