A new sex education Bill proposed by Solidarity TD Ruth Coppinger TD seeks to remove religious ethos from the Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) curriculum entirely, even in religious schools, and require the curriculum to be delivered “factually and objectively”. At the launch of the Bill in Dublin on Wednesday representatives of the Rape Crisis Network, the National Women’s Council, the Irish Family Planning Association and LGBTQI+ advocacy group ShoutOut called for the removal of “religious ethos” from the teaching of relationships and sexuality education in schools. The launch was also attended by representatives of of Atheist Ireland and UCD Students Union. Ms Coppinger said her Bill would require the religious and sexuality education curriculum to be separated and sex education ‘delivered factually’ to cover contraception, sexuality, gender, LGBTQI+ issues and consent.

The bill received pushback from some unlikely quarters with The Times , Ireland, journalist Sarah Carey responding to the National Women’s Council’s endorsement of the bill by saying she finds it “odd to see people complaining, that saying in school, that sex best practiced in loving relationship is a bad thing, when it’s pretty clear that hypersexualisation masquerading as liberation is clearly not serving young women very well”. She continued: “If we’ve a generation of women who seem to have no confidence in their right to say NO – who live under expectation & pressure that they MUST have sex, why is the ONLY source of positivity around relationship based sex being attacked? By feminists!”