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THE IRISH RECORD on sex and relationship education is poor and it will be hugely important to get this area right for our kids, our schools and the future of society.
Due to the widespread religious patronage and involvement in the delivery of our state education system, the experience for many people of sex education in Ireland is one delivered with a Catholic ethos.
This education was often moralistic, inaccurate and had an unrealistic focus on zero tolerance abstinence.
Giving children factual, objective and complete information on how to manage their romantic and sexual relationships will often determine how they approach these relationships for their entire lives.
As a result, our national policies and their implementation have to be robust, comprehensive and the same in every school in the country as much as possible.
The recent report from the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education and Skills took a broad, holistic perspective on the importance of receiving objective and factual sex education.
It must be independent of the ethos of the school and use methods appropriate to the age and developmental levels of students.
We wanted to ensure that discussions of sex education weren’t just made in terms of risk and disease, but focused on encouraging a positive framing of safe, consensual sexual experiences.
We also wanted to broaden the focus beyond just the biological aspects of sex education to emphasise the importance of psycho-social approaches.
Students wouldn’t just be taught in solely biological terms about sex, but would be taught to deal with issues like identifying abuse in a relationship, dealing with the breakup of a relationship or supporting a peer in crisis.
We made it clear that the connection needed to be made with related mental health issues such as anxiety or body dysmorphia, along with focusing on positive framings of good mental health.
Issues to address
A consistent theme from witnesses at the meeting of the Education Committee was the need for discussing sexual consent as an integral part of all sex education reforms.
There is also a need for including the discussion of all types of relationships, sexual orientations and gender identities in the curriculum.
Crucially, we heard strong evidence of school ethos being cited by schools as justification for not providing factual sex education or for delivering the curriculum outside of best practice.
We also heard compelling testimony in relation to the sex education needs of children and adults with an intellectual disability – how they are often seen as eternal children devoid of sexuality, their rates of STI contraction and the massive inadequacies in their sex education currently.
We recommended that the Social Personal and Health Education (SPHE) curriculum, which has been in place since 1999, should undertake significant change. A new curriculum should be made to reflect the changes that have taken place in this country over the last 20 years.
The new curriculum should be gender equality-based, inclusive, holistic, creative, empowering and protective of children’s interests and needs.
Any new curriculum should be fully inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity. LGBT relationships should be represented without distinction from heterosexual ones.
Many schools contract external providers to come into the school to teach Relationship and Sexual Education (RSE).
However, there is no regulation from the Department of Education or the HSE over these providers or what they are teaching.
Some of these providers are offshoots of religious orders and teach RSE with a Catholic ethos, leading to inaccurate and moralistic information being taught to children. There is a clear need for regulation in this area.
Catholic ethos
The other main recommendation in terms of implementation and delivery of new and current curriculum in this area relates to how the religious ethos of a school can affect the content of delivery of RSE.
As most people are aware, over 90% of state primary schools have a Catholic ethos and in Catholic schools, this can serve as a real barrier to comprehensive and objective sex education.
Section 9 of the Education Act 1998 allows for health education to be given to students, having regard to the characteristic spirit of the school. This has been cited as giving schools the room to deliver religious perspectives on sex education, at odds with agreed and international best practice.
The Education Act has to be amended to prevent religious ethos from potentially hindering the effective, objective and factual teaching of the sex education curriculum to which every student is entitled.
This legislative change has been proposed in a relationship and sex education bill from Solidarity – People Before Profit TD Ruth Coppinger which is currently at committee stage in the Dáil. However, it seems to have fallen foul of what appears to be the need for a money message.
There is huge support to advance this, we can’t keep failing generations of young people with inadequate Sex and Relationship education.
As a society we can do better, and we will do better. I have every confidence that we are moving towards an Ireland that has a healthier and more positive attitude to sex and relationships.
Lynn Ruane is an independent senator.
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RIP. A truly dedicated and great, human being.
Why didn’t he go after Stalin? It’s estimated that that dictator was responsible for the mass genocide of in excess of 10 – 15 million men, women and children (including Jews) prior and during WWII.
@Paul: because the Soviet Union won the war and were on the side of the good guys. Like North Korea and Iran today, you can pretty much kill your own people at will, it’s only when you start on those outside your borders that anybody wakes up.
@Paul Shepherd: the soviet Union won the war?
@Allora: originally they had a non-aggression pact with the Nazis but after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR with Operation Barbarossa they changed sides and joined the allied forces. As the allies were the ultimate victors in WW2 Russia is acknowledged as being part of the winning side.
@Karen Delaney: yes thats correct but the way that that was presented looked as if the soviets won it unilaterally.
@Paul: he was only 27 at the time to be fair. I think if he did “go after” Stalin as well you probably wouldn’t be happy. There’s no pleasing some people.
@Allora: in fairness the soviets counter offensive after the doomed operation Barbarossa was unstoppable.by the time of the Normandy landings the Nazis were incredibly weak and under resourced on that front as Hitler had pulled so many divisions from France to try and stop the soviets.they would have won the war even if the Normandy landings had never happened.
I didn’t know he was that old, watched “Getting away with murder(s)” only last night, highly recommended.
A wonderful man who talked the talk and walked the walk. His determination to bring those involved in the horrific Nazi crimes should be a lesson to all involved in prosecuting crime. RIP
It is perhaps because the issue is so intense when framed as the Holocaust that the majority of readers have turned away yet someone has to demonstrate the ideology which led to the extermination of so many human beings. There is no judge and jury here, just information sharing that the ideology which was behind the actions of an advanced society like Germany still remains within the education system as an achievement-
” Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labour in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival. Wannsee Conference, 1942
” In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” Charles Darwin, 1862
I feel sorry for those who died during the invasion, the extermination and fighting on the fields of battle on land, on the sea and in the skies. What can be said for people today who are prepared to maintain the fiction and the sanitised versions of natural selection for the sake of a later science versus religion American variant?
I hope younger readers already know.
@Carrickview: sounds like Palestine
@Sean Padraig O Brien: They fly the swastika in Palestine, so unfortunately you have a point.
Alan, your educational achievements are not determined by your adherence to the truth in the Bible. They are determined by your adherence to the lies espoused by Charles Darwin.
@TheQueenofHibernia:
Darwin was forthright however dangerous and his misguided his and those of Wallace were and remain. It is his followers, even to this day, who try to obscure or lie about the actual conviction and try to say it was social Darwinism that was behind the Nazis and their extermination/invasion policies.
The next time an academic tries to convince you that the Human Race is a social construct or that there is such a thing as social Darwinism, remind them that ‘Favoured Races’ in his main title as an accompanying description of ‘Less Favoured Races’-
‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ Charles Darwin, 1859
A less favoured ‘race’ looks like this-
” Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” Charles Darwin, 1871
@Carrickview: The quotes in your post about prevailing celts and saxons were not written by Charles Darwin. You basically took someone else’s writing and attributed Charles Darwin’s name to it. Cutting and Pasting someone’s else’s words and then putting “-Charles Darwin,1877” at the end.
@Carrickview: if you quote Charles Darwin in an online forum in 2023 you’re absolutely a mentalist.
@Diaspora’d:
It is from ‘The Descent of Man’ and the statement was modified by Darwin. There is an online book and chapter V is where you will find the statement in context.
Younger people have enough information to now know that natural selection isn’t about evolution as the biological and geological history of the Earth is written by the fossil record in rock strata where older rock show simpler lifeforms. It is an old research area that was hijacked by natural selection where they tried to imply that black complexion humans were closer biologically to gorillas than the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ -
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” — Charles Darwin (1871) The Descent of Man.
To exterminate a native culture, they first have to be dehumanised and that is what natural selection did. It is how the Nazis proceeded.
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