Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I stand here as a member of the LGBTQIA community to express my condolences and sadness at the murders of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee that happened during the Easter recess. I am thinking of all of us in our own community and the community of Sligo as we process these senseless acts of violence. These increased acts of violence against LGBTQIA people have not happened in a vacuum. Homophobia, transphobia and biphobia are scourges. Some things the Government can do now to improve LGBTQIA people's lives are to ban conversion therapy, fund trans healthcare, establish legal recognition for non-binary people, support LGBTQIA NGOs and initiate inclusive sex education in schools. While the call for hate crime laws is coming from a well-meaning place, I do not believe these laws will necessarily stop attacks. We need to tackle homophobia at source and create a society where there is no room for hatred.

The second issue I raise is the return to fully in-person learning in our further and higher education institutions. Higher education institutions are sending out their schedules for the 2022-23 academic year at the moment. It is noticeable to see a plan to return to the ableist attendance policies over ensuring full accessibility. Nobody is claiming that recorded lecturers are replacing the quality of in-person teaching. Rather, recorded lectures and other such things are a tool in the education institutions' arsenal for improving accessibility. Recording attendance at lectures for all lectures is just a lazy way of ticking boxes for key performance indicators, KPIs, and is not a metric that accounts for any quality in learning. By returning to fully in-person learning with no options for access outside of just literally showing up, institutions are ignoring the voices of disabled students, students with long-term or chronic illnesses, parents, carers, students for whom English is not their first language and neurodivergent students in order to maintain the status quo, which is silly because we know we can do better. We just do not want to. It has been so disappointing over the past few days to see that some institutions have not learned anything from the Covid-19 pandemic and we are now seeing a move back to the ableism of attendance policies.

We have a Minister dedicated to further and higher education and yet we see this ableism continue under his watch. Removing accessibility options for students is ableist and is not good enough.