It was a brave attempt to inject some much-needed reality into the war zone that still constitutes sex education in this country. But former Taoiseach John Bruton was having none of it, writes Mary Raftery.
Two booklets aimed at 12- to 16-year-olds have been produced jointly by the North Eastern Health Board and the Irish Family Planning Association. Due to be published last month, they were withdrawn at the last minute following a direct attack by John Bruton.
The health board "should not present a hedonistic view of life", he fulminated. They should not be telling children: "Your body is yours to share with whomever you choose".
It has taken many years in Ireland for us to recognise that a crucial way to begin to tackle the very serious problem we have with child sexual abuse is to empower children. Aside from the necessary battery of legal protections and vetting procedures, it is essential that children themselves be armed with the confidence and support to object, complain, report and generally fight back when confronted by those who seek to sexually exploit them.
Telling children their bodies are their own is a fundamental and, one would have thought, entirely unexceptional part of this process.
However, not so for John Bruton and the battery of Catholic organisations which have rowed in behind him to force the withdrawal of the NEHB's booklets.
These booklets are certainly clear and explicit. Using cartoon illustrations, they neither moralise nor preach. They deal with all the myths and complexes surrounding sex and sexual development in young people. They are exactly the kind of books that most of us would wish that we ourselves had had when growing up.
They are designed to encourage children to consider sex as a normal and natural part of their development as individuals, without the twin evils of embarrassment and guilt which have led to so much tragedy in Ireland over the decades.
The vital importance of such straightforward sex education is emphasised by the alarming findings of a number of recent studies. These have consistently highlighted a surprisingly high level of ignorance of even basic knowledge about sex among Irish teenagers. All of them emphasise the need for clear and explicit sex education, made all the more urgent by the rise in sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy among this age group.
John Bruton's most serious criticism of the NEHB's booklets was that they did not mention the age of consent. In fact, the one designed for girls does state it; it is only from the boys' booklet that this information is omitted.
However, when it comes to the age of consent in the country it is clear that the law is an ass. It is illegal to have sex with a girl under the age of 17. But for boys, that age is 15. For homosexual sex, the age is 17 for both.
If John Bruton feels so strongly that age-of-consent information should be conveyed to boys, perhaps he could explain this bizarre differential.
At present, it is against the law for a 16-year-old girl to have sex with anyone. But not so for heterosexual 15-year-old boys. And a 15-year-old boy can have sex with a girl but not with another boy.
All of this stems from the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1935, which was considered so unsuitable for public consumption that it was not even debated in the Dáil.
The purpose of the age of consent is to protect young people from sexual exploitation by older adults. As such, it can be a useful mechanism for prosecuting cases of child sexual abuse. However, to threaten teenagers with this draconian piece of legislation if they have sex with each other could hardly be considered a sane approach to modern sex education.
The criminalisation of young people in this way was identified as a problem by the Law Reform Commission as far back as 1990. In its Report on Child Sexual Abuse it stated: "Parental guidance, improved sexual education and a greater availability of contraceptives, and not the constraints of the criminal law, provide today a better framework for the sexual development of the young."
The current Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, shared this concern. In a Dáil debate over 10 years ago he raised the issue of a change in the law relating to the age of consent for sex between young people who were of similar ages. However, in response to my query yesterday, the Department of Justice now says, somewhat smugly, that no change in the law in this area is envisaged.
Unlike John Bruton, most people would be likely to have fundamental problems with the criminalisation of sexually active teenagers. The current penalty these children face is a potential 10 years in prison. We know at this stage that about a quarter of Irish 16-year-olds have had sex, and the age is dropping.
We all might wish that for their own protection they would wait until they were a bit older and more mature. But does John Bruton seriously suggest that we should threaten to lock them all up?