Speaking exclusively to The Irish Catholic Archbishop Eamon Martin has said that no SPHE (Social Personal and Health Education) or RSE (Relationships and Sexuality Education) resources “should be in any school without consultation with parents”.
“I know there’s a bit of controversy at the moment over particular textbooks – we have not supported the use of any of those textbooks in Catholic schools,” Archbishop Martin said.
The prelate warned that “many of our children are struggling with the issues of today, like gender, being bombarded with stuff online, and a lot of our children need to be able to talk about that and our teachers need to be equipped to be able to talk with them. But there’s a big difference between that and the sort of ideological colonisation that seems to be happening among some people, but not very many”.
His comments come after uproar from some parents and politicians regarding proposed textbooks for students in primary and secondary schools and training for SPHE teachers, including a DCU course which taught about pornographic terms and other highly sexual content.
The archbishop, who is a former teacher and principal, said he believes that Catholic teachers “instinctively know that this stuff is not appropriate” adding that teachers are “simply there to support parents and I do feel that parents are critical to this”.
“Most parents instinctively know what they want their children to learn and when and what is appropriate for their age, if some researcher or academic, comes and says, ‘oh no, children should have the agency here, let’s tell children everything’… that’s like saying to children to go out and play with the traffic and you’ll learn about road safety,” he said.
“We teach children in every aspect of their lives to keep themselves safe and I do believe that parents today are endeavouring to steer their children through what is a very complex and confusing bombardment of messages and parents are trying to hold values, to teach children you are loved by God, we love you, but we want you to respect your body, respect the bodies of others, and respect the gift of sexuality.”
Archbishop Martin believes parents are doing this and “want teachers to support them”.
“The last thing they [parents] want is schools to say, ‘don’t listen to your parents, we know what is better for you’. And that’s where we come in, in trying to provide the materials that allow [Catholic] schools to discuss these topics, even the most controversial topics, like change of gender, like LGBT topics, like abortion, contraception. We have resources that allow those topics to be spoken about in a faith context, which we believe is consistent with the ethos of the school.”
While he does not believe highly sexual or pornographic material “should be near schools”, he adds this does not mean teachers do not need “to be able to understand terms”.
He added: “I taught a lot of these programmes myself and I was always very careful not to put any young person into the position where they had to share intimate details about their own sexuality, or to have it discussed by other pupils in the classroom, and I think we know that instinctively. That’s not to say that children will not be very interested. They will ask questions, and they will want to be given mature, adult answers – that can be done within the ethos of the school.
“We in the Catholic Church have been providing resources now to our schools so that they can have good quality resources. I think parents want their children to be educated in relationships and sexuality, but they do not want the agency of that to be taken entirely away from them and neither should it be.”