TDs urged to protect children from ‘dangerous ideologies’

Improved measures are needed to help keep children safe from “dangerous ideologies and political activism”, Dáil Éireann has been told.

Campaign groups representing teachers, women, families and parents urged Deputies to do more to protect children from the “harmful influence” of transgender ideology, pornography, and explicit sex education material.

In a letter to the Dáil, the Natural Women’s Council, Parents Rights Alliance, Irish Education Alliance and Catholic Secondary School Parents Association raised serious concerns around Ireland’s educational and health policies.

Safety and wellbeing

Signatories called on the Government “to follow the advice of the Cass report and the lead of other countries and ban the use of puberty blockers which have the potential to cause irreversible harm to children”.

They warned that pursuing plans to outlaw so-called conversion therapy risked “many more gender confused or dysphoric children being pushed down a path of gender transitioning, which they may come to bitterly regret”.

It is “deeply troubling”, they wrote, “that activist organisations – including those promoting transgender issues and affirmative approaches, such as BelongTo and TENI – have broad access to children within schools”.

Furthermore, they criticised the exposure of pupils “to utterly inappropriate” sex education, including normalising “the use of pornography”, the “overemphasis on LGBTQI+” issues, and the “teaching of ideologies and their associated terminology that are not based on fact”.

Curriculum changes

The letter also called for the “immediate cessation” of the Junior Cycle Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) Curriculum, and the “suspension of changes to the primary school curriculum” pending reviews of controversial content.

Previously, the Iona Institute noted that the curriculum makes no explicit mention of marriage and its wording “marks a shift: sexual orientation is now defined in terms of gender, not sex”.

Under the updated Primary School Curriculum, children as young as eleven will be told that people can be ‘gay, lesbian or bisexual’, and earlier this year, a concerned mum warned that the Government’s revisions to the SPHE curriculum risked children being taught ‘ideologies not facts’.

Parental rights

Article 42 of the Irish Constitution, “guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children”.

And under the Education Act 1998, parents have right of withdrawal from “instruction in any subject which is contrary to the conscience of the parent of the student”.