The ‘wellbeing’ section of the draft curriculum says it wants to provide children with a “balanced, inclusive, age and developmentally-appropriate understanding of human development and sexuality”. It will include new areas of learning such as consent, digital wellbeing and diversity of family structures, as well as a renewed focus on relationships, emotions and feelings.

Teachers will be supported to make professional judgments on the needs of the children in their class and learning related to puberty may be taught “as appropriate” from third and fourth class upwards.

In addition, children will spend less time on so-called patron’s programmes, or denominational education, but will learn about religions, beliefs and world views as part of a new area of social and environmental education.

The reduction in time spent teaching religion alongside other reforms will give schools more “flexible time” – seven hours a month – to allow schools to focus on priority areas of learning decided by individual schools.

A ‘Yes’ vote in today’s two referendums would result in a “solicitors’ paradise”, according to the Leader of Aontú, Peadar Tóibín TD.

Speaking at a press conference in Buswells Hotel, the Meath West TD said the proposal to add ‘durable relationships’ is “a solicitors’ paradise, virtue signalling amendment a million miles from the lived reality of people’s lives”.

Calling for a no vote he said the Constitution is the fundamental legal document of Ireland, detailing the core rights of citizens and defines the responsibilities of the State. “It is not the location for either definition free amendments with potentially huge consequences or empty meaningless virtue signalling by the government”.

On the ‘Care’ Referendum, Deputy Tóibín said it will create a ceiling of responsibility, from a “neo-liberal” Taoiseach.

“I actually suspect the care amendment was written by the Department of Finance to protect a liability for the state”.

In the proposed wording, he said the state is not obliged to care for the person: “all they have to do is strive to help the person”.

He called it “toxic” to the care of people with disabilities and urged people to vote against it.

Ireland has the highest reported rate of gonorrhoea infection of 30 European countries, according to a new report.

The European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) said there has been a “troubling” rise in the most common sexually transmitted diseases across the continent.

Across the 30 countries in 2022, gonorrhoea cases rose by 48 per cent year on year, with syphilis cases up 34 per cent and chlamydia cases rising 16 per cent. Reported cases of other sexually transmitted diseases, including congenital syphilis, also increased substantially.

A record 3,812 cases of gonorrhoea were reported in Ireland in 2022, an increase of almost 60 per cent since 2018.

Up to 2,000 Irish children born through surrogacy do not have a formal recognition of the adults who commissioned them and wish to be recognised as their parents, an Oireachtas committee has heard. Almost no country in Europe recognises commercial surrogacy because critics says it commodifies children and exploits low-income women. Some countries also ban non-commercial surrogacy. Ireland is planning one of the most permissive surrogacy laws in Europe.

Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said the retrospective recognition of parentage is the most “significant and eagerly awaited component of the whole legislation” for many parents across the country.

He was speaking at a committee meeting on the Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR) Bill whose purpose is to provide a legal framework for domestic and international surrogacy.

Mr Donnelly said the real number of children awaiting recognition of their parentage is unclear as there is no register, adding that estimates range from 300 to 500 before saying there may be 2,000 children.

A controversy has erupted over the decision of the council of the Law Society, the solicitors’ representative body, to publicly support a Yes vote in Friday’s referendums.

One solicitor, Gareth Noble, a leading family and child law solicitor, has withdrawn from the society’s committee on family and child law because of the position taken by the council.

Another solicitor, Jennifer O’Riada told The Irish Times newspaper that the council’s stance was outside its remit and power.

Some other lawyers took to social media to complain the society’s 11,500 members were not consulted before the 39-member council issuing its statement.

A campaign group for former residents of Magdalene laundries has called for a ‘No’ vote in the upcoming referendum to replace the ‘mothers in the home’ clause with a statement on care within the family.

Writing in the Examiner newspaper, Professor Katherine O’Donnell, Dr Maeve O’Rourke, and Dr Claire McGettrick, of the Justice for Magdalenes Research group, noted the “growing numbers of Irish feminists who are publicly admitting that they will vote no” on the care amendment.

They say the proposed article “betrays the committed work of many years by groups who campaigned together to achieve important recommendations from the Citizens’ Assembly and an all-party Oireachtas Committee, only for the Government to propose an entirely opposed understanding of what best constitutes ‘Care.’”

They add: “The Government wants to insist that it is families, first, foremost and solely who must provide care while the State will “strive” to support them. The Government’s proposed clause makes a distance between citizens, presumed clustered in family groupings, and a transcendent State, removed from obligations to care, committed to (at best) offering forms of support for all of the caring work that must be done.”

The Presbyterian Church in Ireland (PCI) has called the forthcoming family and care referendums a “missed opportunity” that would likely not be of any real benefit.

In a letter to its members, they say the “ambiguity and lack of clarity contained within some of the amendments will mean that it is unlikely to introduce meaningful change, which could have been of benefit to society as a whole”.

Specifically regarding the family referendum, they say, “we are disappointed that the proposed amendment seeks to remove the link between marriage and family”.

They add that they are “not alone in foreseeing major problems that will arise from the lack of clarity surrounding this new definition and interpretation of ‘durable relationships’ in the proposed new text”.

 On the “mothers in the home” or “care” amendment they express concern that the deletion of this article may unintentionally devalue the “pivotal role that mothers have in nurturing and bringing up children”, and lead to a failure to recognise “the huge economic, as well as the social value of parents (mothers and fathers), who have the ability to stay at home with their children during their formative years”.

Pope Francis has said contemporary cultural challenges including gender ideology are putting at risk a culture that protects human and Christians vocations.

Gender ideology believes that gender is divorced from one’s biological sex and can be changed at will.

“It is very important that there is this meeting, this meeting between men and women, because today the ugliest danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences,” the Pope said during an audience with members of the French-based academic organisation Research and Anthropology of Vocations Institute (CRAV).

Gender ideology, which seeks to blur differences between men and women through movements such as transgenderism, “makes everything the same,” Francis said.

“Erasing differences is erasing humanity. Man and woman, however, are in a fruitful ‘tension,’” Francis told the assembly, which gathered in Rome for a two-day international conference titled “Man, Woman, Image of God: For an Anthropology of Vocations.”

https://www.ncregister.com/cna/pope-francis-today-the-ugliest-danger-is-gender-ideology

France has become the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

Parliamentarians voted 780-72 to revise the country’s 1958 constitution to enshrine women’s “guaranteed freedom” to abort. Abortion has been available on wide grounds in France for almost 50 years. About 200,000 terminations take place in the country each year versus about 680,000 births.

President Emmanuel Macron described the move as “French pride” that had sent a “universal message”.

However pro-life groups have strongly criticised the change.

And while several other countries include reproductive rights in their constitutions – France is the first to explicitly state that an abortion will be guaranteed.

It becomes the 25th amendment to modern France’s founding document, and the first since 2008.

Following the vote, the Eiffel Tower was lit up with the message: “My Body My Choice”.

Party Leader, Michael Collins, said that it’s “incredible to think that two days before Mother’s Day, the Irish government wants to remove the word woman from the constitution.”

“Here we have not one but two referendums that have been poorly worded, poorly communicated and rushed through without proper scrutiny and mixed messages on our current constitution from government ministers means I do not have the confidence to advocate for any change to our current constitution”.

“At a time when so many people are struggling to make ends meet, it is this sort of symbolic but ultimately insubstantial political point-scoring that grinds the gears of so many people. While the government spend millions of taxpayer’s monies on two referendums, the struggle in the cost of living, housing, healthcare and any number of other issues continue for ordinary men and women across the country”.