Niamh Smyth (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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11. To ask the Minister for Education and Skills if consideration has been given to rolling out a national bystander intervention programme around sexual and gender-based violence; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [36756/22]

Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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Has any consideration been given to the roll-out of a national bystander intervention programme around sexual and gender-based violence and will the Minister make a statement on the matter?

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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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.

Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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That is very welcome. As the Minister is aware, Carlow is now a university town and county. I welcome the culture of zero tolerance of all forms of sexual hostility, harassment and violence by society to actively contribute to a safe, supportive environment. This is especially important for higher and further educational institutions. I welcome the extension of the programme to the second level, which is good for secondary schools. That is important. The development of a national toolkit to educate and support safe bystander intervention will promote pro-social behaviour and attitudes. It is important that we can ensure across all sectors that we include everyone. It is great to see that happening.

There are good examples of such initiatives. The Minister mentioned the UCC bystander intervention programme. In the United States, there is what is called the green dot bystander intervention. Is the Minister aware of that? He is not. That is another approach that is in use and seems to be very good. What the Minister said is welcome and I thank him.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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I thank the Deputy. I will certainly familiarise myself with that American example. Much progress has been made by the higher education sector in recent years, as, quite frankly, it had to be made. We need to take these programmes out from behind the walls of the universities and make them more widely available across society. Professor Crowley has led in that regard. There has also been the good example of the active consent programme in NUI Galway under Pádraig MacNeela. We now have an online hub regarding consent. Any student, parent or teacher can access different information appropriate to them around the whole issue of consent. My colleague, the Minister for Justice, Deputy McEntee, is overseeing a new strategy, the third national strategy on gender-based and domestic violence, and the zero-tolerance approach. These actions will feed in as a core part of achieving the societal change we need to achieve.

Jennifer Murnane O'Connor (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Minister. I welcome the online hub and the intervention programme about which the Minister has spoken. Is there a timeframe involved? Have all the colleges and schools been contacted? It is important for that information to be out there. It is good news that the Government is being so proactive on this issue. We are going to do everything we can to ensure we give all the information and that we have a programme in place for all colleges and schools.

Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael)
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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.