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We need to have that little chat. The one about the birds and the bees. Specifically, we need to talk about sex education and who gets to control it. I know it’s awkward and a little embarrassing. But it’s time. Funny changes have been going on in the body politic and we can’t ignore them anymore.
It’s about what happens when the church and the State love each other very much and cuddle up very close and then begin to drift apart, but neither of them wants to be honest about it. So they both go on pretending that this is still a hundred years ago when they first met.
The Catholic Church has just published Flourish, a new programme for relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in the primary schools under its control in both parts of the island. Much of it is thoughtful and caring and clearly crafted by people who are committed to the dignity of all children.
Since same-sex couples are barred from the sacrament, they are also barred from sexual love in the teaching
But the overall purpose of the programme is no less clear: it is to inculcate in those children a very specific set of religious doctrines about sexuality. In fairness, this intention is not disguised.
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“There is”, says the introduction, “no such thing as an ‘ethos free’ approach to RSE since it must be rooted in a particular value system… The Catholic school must consider these topics within a moral framework that reflects the teachings of the Church.”
Sex education, in other words, is indistinguishable from religious indoctrination. And one of the things that must be emphasised in the “particular value system” is the church’s teaching that marriage between people of the same sex is sinful and illegitimate.
The Flourish programme uses soft language about LGBTI+ people and says that sex education “must not promote shame, but rather seek to affirm that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God”. It adds a qualification: “However, the Church’s teaching in relation to marriage between a man and a woman cannot be omitted.”
That “however” cancels everything that comes before it. Once you start qualifying equality, you nullify it. You can’t banish shame with one hand and delegitimise same-sex relationships with the other.
The lesson plan for senior primary school classes emphasises an inclusive message: “My sexuality is part of who I am. God loves me as I am.”
But to this apparently unconditional divine love, terms and conditions apply. The overall theme is “Sexual love belongs within a committed relationship. Marriage as a sacrament of commitment.”
The only context in which sexual love can be expressed is within sacramental marriage. Since same-sex couples are barred from the sacrament, they are also barred from sexual love.
In spite of the evidently good intentions of the people involved in creating the Flourish programme, the church is innately incapable of teaching children about sexuality
Even within the Flourish lesson plans, the contradiction is glaring. One fifth-class lesson calls for pupils to make pictures of “all the different kinds of family groups that they know in their own lives”. This explicitly includes “same-sex families”. The lesson to be drawn is that “love is at the heart of all families”.
This is very welcome and it shows that lay Catholicism has come a long way. But it is surely, for children, hopelessly confusing . On the one hand, same sex families are just as loving as all the other family types. On the other, they are sinful and improper.
For any child with same-sex parents, the signals are, to use a term the church seems to like, disordered. For any child dealing with uncertainties about an emerging sexual identity, they are dangerously perplexing.
In spite of the evidently good intentions of the people involved in creating the Flourish programme, the church is innately incapable of teaching children about sexuality in a way that is either internally coherent or compatible with the Constitution’s definition of marriage as contracted by “two persons without distinction as to their sex”.
So what does the State do? The current programme for government commits it to “Develop inclusive and age-appropriate RSE and SPHE curricula across primary and post-primary levels, including an inclusive programme on LGBTI+ relationships”.
Asked about this by Róisín Shortall in the Dáil last week, the Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said "That is the Government's policy and position, and it is what we expect to be upheld in publicly funded schools… The ethos of the school should never preclude learners from acquiring knowledge about the issues involved, but may influence how the content is treated."
In this statement, “expect” and “should” are mere flannel. They are statements of what the State would wish to be the case. The operative bit is that it is the school’s ethos that determines the content of sex education.
That ethos is decided, for more than 90 per cent of primary schools in the Republic, by the Catholic bishops. The democratically elected Government can develop whatever sex education programme it wants. Its writ does not run beyond the school gates.
Successive governments have refused to deal with this historic anomaly. As so often in Irish life, it is hidden within a fiction
For thousands of teachers, the ethos of our church-run primary schools is still one of fear and shame. Last month, the Irish National Teachers Organisation revealed that just 18 per cent of LGBTI+ teachers in Catholic schools in the Republic, and just 12 per cent in Northern Ireland, are open about their sexuality in the school community.
Thus, many of the teachers who are required to educate their pupils that “God loves me as I am” know only too well that what God feels and what his representative on earth do may be radically different things.
At the heart of these contradictions is the simple fact that a church whose teaching on sexuality is rejected by most Irish people nonetheless retains control of the schools that those people pay for through their taxes.
But successive governments have refused to deal with this historic anomaly. As so often in Irish life, it is hidden within a fiction.
That fiction is “divestment”: the illusion that the church is voluntarily divesting itself of control of primary schools. It is a farce.
Divestment has been official policy since 1998 and has made virtually no difference. In 2009, there were 2,878 primary schools with a Catholic ethos. In 2019, there were 2,760. The church’s domination of the system has fallen from 90.9 per cent of schools to 88.8 per cent. It would be a good exam question: at this rate, how many years will it take for church control to fall below 50 per cent?
So long as the State maintains this fiction, its claim in the programme for government that it is going to introduce an inclusive sex education curriculum is fictional too. And so is the sexual identity that about 4,000 primary school teachers feel they have to present to colleagues and parents.
It is the State, and not the church, that has to take responsibility for this failure. Control of primary schools belongs, not with a group of unaccountable men, but with the communities they serve. Until governments establish that principle, their claims to determine what children are told about sex are for the birds and bees.