Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this extremely important matter. Bystander training can be a crucial intervention to help educate people about sexual and domestic violence prevention. This type of training programme can highlight the danger of normalising abusive behaviour. It cultivates an understanding of people's capacity to intervene and it can provide learners with a safe environment to better understand appropriate social interactions. It also helps to identify unacceptable behaviour, ensuring an understanding of the importance and meaning of consent but also, more broadly, personal assertiveness and social responsibility.

University College Cork, UCC, launched its online bystander intervention in January 2019 and I commend and thank Professor Louise Crowley in the UCC school of law for her leadership on this initiative. The UCC programme seeks to educate and empower students to support the development of a visible institutional culture which stands against unacceptable behaviour and abuse. It also seeks to foster a culture of positivity and support.

In 2019, the Higher Education Authority awarded €350,000 in performance funding in recognition of the impact of the programme. The Higher Education Authority's centre of excellence for equality, diversity and inclusion has since been working with the UCC bystander programme to facilitate, as the Deputy suggested, the national roll-out of this programme. National reporting on the framework for consent in November of last year showed that a majority of our higher education institutions have now engaged with the UCC bystander programme and are either offering or intending to offer the training. There has been good progress in that regard, I am pleased to say. The Higher Education Authority has this year allocated €20,000 to support the roll-out of a pilot of the online version of the UCC bystander programme in all higher education institutions. It can be accessed immediately once invitations are issued by UCC to participating staff and students.

In another very welcome development, the bystander programme has now advised that it is responding to growing interest from second level schools. This is important because third level can be too late and it would be better if some of this happened in second level, if not earlier. The bystander programme has now developed a pilot intervention training programme at second level. That has initially been rolled out in seven schools and training has been provided to 140 teachers. It is now being rolled out in 45 schools and I thank Professor Crowley for that.

We intend to roll out the programme nationally. We are nearly there, quite frankly. Almost all our higher education institutions are now saying they are on board and schools are also getting in on the act.

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