When it comes to the forthcoming public inquiry into the Government’s handling of Covid, Micheál Martin couldn’t have been clearer.
“All voices must be heard,” the Tánaiste was reported to have said — a tacit acknowledgement that any serious scrutiny of public policy would be incomplete without hearing from those who disagreed with lockdown, as well as those who cheered it on.
How can lessons be learned, after all, without welcoming a multiplicity of points of view?
The Taoiseach is a eager combatant in the culture wars
Why then, when the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association wrote to the Government recently to express concern that they were being “required to teach something, about which there is neither a scientific or social consensus, to highly impressionable young children” when it comes to the issue of transgender identity, did Martin join other politicians in criticising them for doing so?
Writing such a letter was, the Tánaiste declared sheepishly, “not the way to deal with these issues”.
What happened to “all voices must be heard”?
That’s the problem when it comes to the great liberal causes of the day.
It’s “all voices must be heard” — right up to the moment that certain voices ask politely to be heard, then it becomes “some voices must be heard”.
And the voices which must be heard invariably turn out to be the ones which agree with the ideology underpinning government policy.
Isn’t this the very groupthink which, during the Covid crisis, excluded anyone who objected to the extended closure of schools?
Sadly, that kind of joined-up thinking appears alien to the class of career politicians who now run Ireland.
Just because they now grudgingly accept mistakes were made in the handling of Covid, it doesn’t mean they have the humility to concede mistakes may now be being made in other areas of government — and that we might in future come to wish that we’d listened to detractors then too.
Martin can’t be oblivious to the fact that many parents and others of good will are concerned about what’s being taught in schools.
Is he really so afraid of upsetting his Fine Gael and Green colleagues he won’t urge them to slow down rather than galloping blindly along a path whose end is unknown?
No child has ever been born in the wrong body
The Taoiseach, as usual, is seeking to present himself as the reasonable one in the room on this issue.
“Why not just give them information and facts?” Leo Varadkar said when asked in Waterford about concerns around teaching children contentious theories about gender.
“It doesn’t have to be a value judgment about whether it’s right or wrong.”
It makes one wonder if he even understands the meaning of the words “value judgment”.
Once something is taught to children — as a matter of state policy — as verifiable fact, a value judgment has already been made.
One book now used in primary schools is called Busy Bodies. It’s intended to “reassure (children) that puberty is a normal part of growing up”.
In that book, it is stated as fact: “We all have a gender identity.”
This is a belief, not a fact.
At root, it instils the idea that gender is independent of biological reality, which is where the idea comes from that you can be born in the ‘wrong’ body.
No child has ever been born in the wrong body. The body is not inseparable from the self. It is the self.
To teach children that some people feel themselves to be a different gender, one that is at odds with their body, would be entirely factual, and that can and should be done in a sympathetic, non-judgmental way.
But teaching children that this gendered soul is real and demonstrable, and must be affirmed as true — as Busy Bodies does — is a very different matter.
This is not accepting puberty as a normal, natural “part of growing up”.
It is teaching that puberty as a physical process may be at odds with one’s innermost being. There is no way to do so without confusing children.
It’s certainly not value-free, whatever the Taoiseach might declare.
Dr Hilary Cass, who wrote last year’s report into the controversial Tavistock Clinic in London at which hundreds of trans-identifying Irish children were exposed to treatments founded in ideological fervour rather than clinical care, has warned that endorsing and facilitating these theories in schools is not a “neutral act”.
So-called “social transition” is instead, she said, an “active intervention” with “significant effects on the child or young person in terms of their psychological functioning”, adding: “Better information is needed.”
Joined-up thinking is alien to the career politicians who now run Ireland
This call to caution, which has been echoed by expert reviews in other liberal countries such as Finland and Sweden, has been ignored by policy makers in Ireland, who then congratulate themselves for doing so.
The Taoiseach actually said in the Dáil last week he hoped we could all “agree to try and avoid the kind of culture wars that we’ve seen in other countries around the trans issue”.
This is like Man A hitting Man B, and then when Man B strikes back, Man A throwing up his hands in mock horror and pleading for the fighting to stop.
Only listening to activists and lobbyists on one side of the argument — while telling a body which represents around 98pc of primary schools in the country that writing a polite letter outlining their concerns is “not the way” to go about things — is not being an observer of the battle.
It’s being a combatant.
How on earth are we ever meant to find the “centre ground” of which Leo Varadkar loosely speaks, without hearing from all points of view?
Last week, even President Higgins weighed in on the issue, insisting schools teach “basic information regarding sexuality in the fullest sense”.
On the surface, his language appears mild and inoffensive, but it too has an effect, and it’s not one which can be unpicked without questioning him about what he means by “basic information”. That’s a contested area.
Naturally, we cannot cross-examine the President in such a way, which is one reason why holders of the role traditionally leave policy-making to the Government and avoid making controversial statements.
But of course no senior minister will dare tell President Higgins to get back in his lane or chide him for engaging in the “culture wars”.
How many more years will it take before ministers concede that all voices should have been heard in the debate on transgender issues as well, to avoid rushing headlong into a national programme of what one writer has described as “early social transition, presided over by amateurs”?
To avoid groupthink, other voices must be heard. Don’t take my word for it. The Tánaiste himself said so.
