Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The colleges and schools have been contacted. The first letter I wrote to university presidents when I took up this role was not about the important issue of future funding and the like but was about the whole issue of sexual harassment and consent. We wrote to every university president and requested that they put in place a plan for their institutions. We asked how each of the presidents would adopt a zero-tolerance approach and what they would do to tackle sexual harassment. I was not asking them to hide beyond national frameworks, important as national frameworks are. I wanted each of the presidents to reflect on how the national framework could be applied to their institutions. I am pleased to say that every single one of them now has a plan and each of those plans has been published. The institutions are now having to report against those plans to the Higher Education Authority on an annual basis. That has been a big shift.

The online consent hub is now up and running. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, and I launched it in January 2022. I praise the active consent project team at NUI Galway for its work. The online consent hub provides for the first time in our country a publicly available educational resource on sexual consent for young people, their families and educators. It is the first national online resource we have had around consent. Incredible work has been done in NUI Galway to deliver that.

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