Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I want to mention the platform, Speak Out, that was launched this week by the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris. Speak Out is an anonymous online platform that allows students and staff to report incidents of sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, bullying, cyberbullying and everything in between. It is to operate across our third level institutions. It must be a welcome thing. It is wonderful that there is an anonymous online platform that makes it as easy as possible for people to report these activities so they can be dealt with at whatever level is appropriate.

I wonder, in the circumstances, if we should be looking at advancing this tool into secondary schools also. It is not as if we do not know that this kind of behaviour is happening also at second level. There is an opportunity for a similar anonymous online platform to be available to secondary school students, teachers in secondary schools, and parents of students in secondary schools. We know this is happening, and we mention these issues a lot in this House. They have come to the fore particularly in recent years and such behaviour causes enormous damage to the victims.

Sometimes, we expect people to come forward and do what we see many brave victims or survivors of this kind of behaviour do, which is to come forth and stand in the media, sometimes in the spotlight of television cameras, and say what happened to them, but not everybody can do that. It is actually an exceedingly difficult thing to do. The idea of an anonymous online platform is welcome because it allows people who perhaps do not have the wherewithal to stand in the glare of a camera, or the media or in the public eye to say these things. It allows them still to report it and to register what has happened to them, and still to put it into the hands of the officials, and hopefully the mechanism to monitor what is happening and take steps to deal with that.

I welcome Speak Out. It is an excellent initiative and I congratulate the Minister, Deputy Harris, for it. I hope we could possibly extend it into other areas of education, particularly into second level education.