Tonight in Cork city the recently graduated sixth years of St Vincent’s Catholic girls’ school will be holding their debs. The men accompanying the young women to the event will find an unusual item on their side-plates; a complimentary condom. Safe sex, or an invitation to have sex? 

The defenders of the idea insist they’re trying to promote safe and responsible sex. The critics, myself included, insist they’re effectively inviting the guests to have sex. The analogy doesn’t quite hold, but what they’re doing is the equivalent of providing clean needles based on the assumption that half the guests will be shooting themselves up later on in the night. 

Contrary to popular belief, most teenagers are not having sex. The average age of the girls attending this debs will be around 18. The average age of first sexual intercourse in Ireland seems to be around 17. But an average is only an average. Many teenagers will have had sex before the age of 17, and many who are 17 won’t have had sex yet. 

Putting a condom on each plate assumes everyone attending this ball is sexually active, and if they are not, it effectively invites them to become sexually active. 

Condom campaigns have been shown to work only when targeted at specific populations. For example, they have been shown to reduce the incidence of HIV/Aids transmission among prostitutes. But they have not been shown to work among general populations. 

Experts say this may be due to what is called ‘risk-compensating’ behaviour, meaning condom use encourages people to take risks in their personal lives they wouldn’t otherwise take and also to adopt a more casual attitude to sexual relations, meaning they place less importance on fidelity, for example. 

Quite apart from anything else, the move is incredibly crass and the dinner-time conversation is bound to be dominated by talk of condoms which is not exactly the sort of thing people normally talk about at dinner-dances.