Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I extend my congratulations to all involved with Project Search. I would like the Minister for Education to come into this House to explain what is going on at the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, NCCA, and the very strange approach it is taking to its draft curriculum for social, personal and health education, SPHE, cycle in secondary schools.Many are concerned that questionable ideology and assumptions about reality that are not evidence based are to be found in this draft curriculum. There seems be evidence of critical race theory, queer theory and gender theory. These are being pushed, not discussed, and there is certainly no room for challenging them. Throughout the draft curriculum, we find language designed to push these ideologies, but no suggestion that it is ever appropriate to consider the worth of or to push back against some of the highly contestable ideas being promoted. What would be of concern to most people is the potential doubt being sown in young people's minds about the reality that, whatever about the existence of gender dysphoria and confusion about gender identity, there are, in fact, two genders. To deny this and push controversial and unevidenced theories is no more and no less than to push a sexual ideology on young people that is not conducive to the mental health of some.

I wonder how this has come about. A recent freedom of information request by the Federation of Catholic Secondary School Parents Associations threw up something revealing. At a recent round-table stakeholders' meeting - note the use of the word "stakeholders" - held by the NCCA on 2 October as part of its supposed consultation on senior cycle SPHE, and at which 70 people were present, not a single official representative of parents was present. I do not deny that there might have been people there who were parents, but nobody was there as a representative of parents. None of the national secondary level parents organisations were invited. Strangely, the CEO of the National Parents Council, primary, was invited to a stakeholders discussion about second level SPHE. However, she did not show up and failed to send a parent substitute. Among the attendees were plenty of the in groups. There were university consent teams, in other words, sex educators. It seems the NGOs on the inside track, the government within the Government, were present. The well-financed Trans Equality Network Ireland, TENI, Belong To and ShoutOut were all invited and attended. Good luck to them to be given a place, but what does it say about the NCCA that it carried on with a consultation without a single secondary school parent representative being invited? It gets worse. When the question was put to the NCCA for the names of the parents' representatives invited, it took them a month to reply and reveal the embarrassing truth that no secondary parent representative was invited, and only one primary representative who did not show up.

The problem is that I do not believe this is a cock up. This is an attempt to exclude parents from having a decisive say on what goes into the curriculum about social, personal and health education. It goes against the letter and spirit of Bunreacht na hÉireann. Is the NCCA going rogue, when you have an attempt to control how people think by obsessive control of the school curriculum and very little respect for parents and their vital constitutional role in these matters?