Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimhe an Aire Stáit. The Minister of State is very welcome. It is good to engage with her and I thank her for coming to the House. There is a fair degree of concern among many people with regard to the Government's capacity to consult the general public on matters of public importance and to take on board feedback, specifically. Consultation with advocacy NGOs that are Government-funded may be high on the Government's agenda but when it comes to wider consultation it sometimes seem that views that are received are often sidelined. The widespread public consultation on the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 eventually resulted in substantial opposition to aspects of the Bill being ignored and a small cohort of lobbyists being heard instead. That has led, in my view, to a Bill that is toxic to freedom of expression and that smuggles in a bizarre and indeed dangerous definition of gender.

A similar scenario played out with the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment and its public consultation on the new social, personal, and health education syllabi. Much of the feedback received in first round consultations was ignored and it was only when ordinary people fought back that the Minister intervened and an adjusted syllabus was produced.

There is concern now that public consultations on gender equality referendums may be disregarded. It is now more than four months since the closure of that consultation and it is time for the Minister to share the outcomes of that consultation with us. This is important because the Government's understanding of and attitude toward gender is a key issue in the context of those referendums. I believe the Government's understanding and attitude to gender and its meaning is emerging as a risk issue for Irish people, to be frank. The Government has tried to pull the wool over people's eyes with a circular explanation of gender in the hate speech and hate crimes Bill. It does not use the term "gender spectrum" but that is what is implied. In the Bill, gender is any gender identity or expression that one wishes it to be and there are more than 100 such identity terms currently known.

For ordinary folk brought up on common sense and informed by science, gender and sex are effectively synonymous. Gender is a noun and gender is either male or female. Gender can also be employed in an adjectival sense, as in gender expression or gender identity. These are ways people see themselves, a dimension of their own perception of who they are. As such, gender expression and gender identity are subjective ideas and as such they are the person's own business with no necessary external manifestation in society. There can be as many identities as there are people or personalities.

In the context of these forthcoming gender referendums where the definition of gender will be crucial, it is troubling that the Government wants us to believe that gender-sex and gender identity are the same, that the noun can be replaced by attaching gender to a completely different noun and still mean the same thing. To take an example, linguistically tennis and a tennis ball are not the same thing, and a car and a car race are not the same thing. As such, gender is not the same thing as gender identity. This is not a mere word game. What the Government has been asking us to swallow is that gender, as in the male-female binary, is no longer of importance and that it must give way to this idea of identity. This is saying that being a man or a woman is no longer a valuable description for society or for law but that one must be viewed as existing along this imaginary spectrum. The law does not have feelings. The law sees men and women and the consequences that flow from the difference as significant. If there were no real world consequences to male-female differences, then the law would not distinguish and that is as far as it should go. The trick of mixing gender and gender identity was pulled, effectively, at the citizens' assembly and has been baked into the hate Bill. It is really important, therefore, since this issue is connected with the likely content of proposed referendums, that we hear at an early date what citizens have been saying about all of this in the consultation. I do not think we should be months on from that consultation without having heard from the Government and that is why I am asking for a report back on the consequence of that consultation.