The launch by the Minister for Education, Ms Breathnach, of the Going Forward Together booklet on relationships and sexuality is a welcome, if belated, attempt to banish some of the timidity that has been allowed to dominate State thinking in this area. The provision of social and personal education - including sex education - in our schools is underdeveloped. Some schools and some health board areas have made valiant efforts to introduce a comprehensive system of sex education. But many mainstream Catholic schools either shy away from it or approach the complex issue of human sexuality in a mechanical and defensive way.
A great deal of good, ground breaking work is being done by conscientious teachers and parents all over this State, but the overall impression is of an ad hoc system, still not properly integrated into the full school cycle. Remarkably, there is still no national policy and only draft national guidelines to assist those schools who do want to operate the kind of sex education programme which is applied routinely in most other EU states. As a society, we have paid a price for the obscurantism that has been allowed to settle on the whole area of sex education it is there in the abuse of children by adults; it is there in the fear of sex which has undermined some marriages and it is there in the thousands of young teenage mothers who must very suddenly come terms with the trauma of giving birth and the responsibility of parenthood.
Some progress has been made during Ms Breathnach's tenure in office. Some 20,000 primary and 1,600 second level teachers are completing training courses which will enable them to teach the guidelines on relationships and sexuality education, prepared by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. The new booklet, which ranges across a wide spectrum of issues including sexuality, responsibility, friendship and relationships, is intended primarily as a guide for parents in what can be a difficult and sensitive area. This is an admirable attempt to draw parents more closely into education indeed research would suggest that parents are anxious that our schools should become more proactive in this area.
That said, there are - in political terms - very few hostages to fortune in the approach now favoured by the Minister. The booklet is not prescriptive, offering, instead, what senior officials call a "menu" from which individual schools can adapt to their own use. The schools are free to stamp their own individual ethos on the provision of sex education; they are free to decide whether it will be taught in religion or civics class; parents are free to opt out of the programme, if they so wish.
Ms Breathnach is clearly well motivated and, given a choice, would undoubtedly like to see a thoroughgoing sex education programme in place in all schools. The programme her department has prepared is rooted solidly in the world of today, where our children are exposed - in reality, whether we like it or not to sex and sexuality in film, television the printed media. Because of this we must also remember, whether it is palatable or not, that many children are more sexually active at a younger age. The Minister's decision to allow each school to tailor the programme to its own needs is also very admirable in itself. But the danger is that some schools could use this freedom to maintain a narrowly focused view of sex education which no longer reflects the realities of modern Ireland.