Northern Irish bishops abandon ship: parents must resist
By John Smeaton | 9 April 2025
According to United Nations bodies and international pro-abortion organisations, the objective of Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) is to provide children and young people with legalised access to contraception and abortion, without their parents’ knowledge or consent. In 2023, the British government imposed this objective on Northern Ireland by force of law, and it is currently being realised in the schools of the Province, including Catholic schools, with the active collaboration of the Catholic Schools’ Trustees Service, whose Board of Directors includes His Grace Eamon Martin, Archbishop of Archdiocese of Armagh, the Catholic primate of Ireland, and is it chaired by Bishop Donal McKeown, the bishop of Derry.
One of the last acts of Teresa May’s Conservative government was to commit a shocking abuse of the parliamentary process, on 4 July 2019, forcing one of Europe’s most extreme abortion regimes on Northern Ireland under the pretext of a report issued in 2018 by the UN Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (the so called CEDAW Committee). Government legislation, which was ostensibly about restoring self-government to Northern Ireland, brutally suppressed over 50 years of overwhelming Northern Irish political opposition to abortion when Members of Parliament voted by 332 to 99 to decriminalise abortion in the Province. Just over 2 weeks after its second reading in the House of Commons, the Northern Ireland Executive (Formation) Act received Royal Assent.
This same government legislation imposed same-sex marriage on Northern Ireland by 383 votes to 73. All 11 Northern Irish MPs voted against abortion, whilst 8 out of the 11 MPs voted against same-sex marriage.
As Liam Gibson, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children’s political officer, put it at the time:
“The pretext for all this was a report issued in 2018 by the United Nations compliance committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This report, under article 8 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention, claimed that Northern Ireland’s abortion laws violated human rights standards. But abortion is not a human right. It is an act of lethal violence directed at an unborn child and is never justified. No UN convention has ever recognized access to abortion as a human right. Nor does a UN committee have the authority to compel a State to change its abortion laws. Whilst paying lip-service to the restoration of self-government, the use of raw political power to impose abortion and same-sex ‘marriage’ on Northern Ireland has violated the devolution settlement and seriously undermined the Good Friday agreement. It now seems that the people of the Province will no longer be permitted to maintain laws which don’t meet with the approval of politicians from England, Scotland and Wales.”
The legislative/cultural power-grab by Westminster over Northern Ireland was followed up on 1 July 2023 by the Relationships and Sexuality Education (Northern Ireland) (Amendment) Regulations. As a result of this legislation, imposed on the Province by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Government, it became illegal for teachers in Catholic schools to instil in their pupils Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life from conception, a teaching also upheld by many non-Catholics. Instead, all schools, regardless of their ethos or religious status, must teach children between the ages of 11 and 16 that they have a right to abortion and tell girls how to get one without their parents finding out.
The explanatory note accompanying the Relationships and Sexuality Education (Northern Ireland) (Amendment) Regulations 2023 tells schools that they must not “advocate or promote any particular opinion, on sexual and reproductive health and rights in accordance with the recommendations in the Report of the Inquiry concerning the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland under article 8 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (‘the CEDAW report’).”
Once again, the British Government was relying on the opinion of the UN compliance Committee, the CEDAW committee, to impose on Northern Ireland’s schools, by force of law, the obligation to promote and facilitate abortion and contraception amongst their pupils, a committee that lacks any authority to tell any State what to do. The CEDAW committee claimed that “young people in Northern Ireland were denied the education necessary to enjoy their sexual and reproductive health and rights”, stating that, “where relationship and sexuality education is delivered, it is frequently provided by third parties and based on [an] anti-abortion and abstinence ethos.” The authors of the CEDAW report attributed this to the influence of both Catholic and Protestant church representatives in the management of the Province’s schools. It is this alleged “anti-abortion and abstinence ethos” that these Regulations aim to eradicate.
Forcing schools to promote and facilitate abortion is not a neutral or value-free position. It is by definition the promotion of a “particular opinion”. The 2023 Regulations, therefore, as well as being a contradiction in terms, are aimed particularly at suppressing the expression of religious views opposed to abortion.
Relationships and Sex Education programmes in the schools of the Province achieve the British government’s objective in four main ways:
- They undermine the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children;
- They break down the innate reserve and modesty of children, instincts which are given by God to protect a child’s virtue;
- They deny or fail to explain the existence of eternal moral truths such as the sanctity of human life and of marriage being the exclusive, life-long union of one man and one woman;
- They refer children to institutions with explicit ideological agendas on abortion, contraception, and sexual immorality, including the LGBT agenda.
In all four ways of achieving their objective, the British Government is, tragically, being assisted by Catholic leaders who are failing to exercise their authority to insist on the truth about parents being the primary educators of their children, about purity, about marriage, the sanctity of human life and the intrinsic evil of contraception. Catholic leaders are, thereby, delivering families to the power of the state and our children to the birth-control industry and the abortionists.
In an apparently tough statement in June 2023, the Northern Irish Catholic bishops condemned the British Government’s forthcoming Relationships and Sex Education legislative proposals for Northern Ireland, and extolled the rights of parents, saying:
“It is not for a Government to impose one ideological approach on children, parents or on our schools, over others. This is why the right of parents to an education for their children that is in accordance with their ethical, religious and philosophical convictions, is an internationally recognised human right.”
Elsewhere, Archbishop Eamon Martin has spoken about the “inalienable” right of parents in relation to Relationships and Sex Education — “inalienable” denoting something with which there can be no legal interference.
However, despite such fine words the tragic truth is that the Irish Catholic bishops had already completely surrendered the rights of parents two years before the Relationships and Sex Education legislation was put before the British Parliament.
Indeed, the bishops’ declarations of belief in parents’ inalienable rights lack all credibility in the light of the practical policies spelled out in their 2021 Guidance from the Catholic Schools Trustee Service. Whilst the Guidance describes parents as “the first and foremost educators” of their children and “key to the effective delivery of the school’s RSE programme”, they make it clear that the RSE policy and programme should also be reviewed by the school chaplain, the diocesan adviser, the RSE co-ordinator, the principal, the senior management team, the school council, the teaching staff and the school governors.
The powerlessness of parents is made worse by the “cross-curricular” approach to teaching RSE which is strongly encouraged by the Catholic Schools’ Trustee Service. Their 2021 document urges that “in so far as possible Relationships and Sexuality Education will be taught in a cross-curricular way. The following subject areas could contribute to a cross-curricular approach: child development, drama, English, home economics, learning for life and work, physical education, religious education, science and technology.”
Whilst the Catholic Schools Trustee Service says that parents’ requests to withdraw their child from sex education may be granted “on an individual basis”, how is it possible for parents to do so without withdrawing their children from school entirely in order to avoid all the subject areas which might be covering RSE?
I am bound to conclude that Archbishop Eamon Martin and the Northern bishops have been paying mere lip-service to parents as the primary educators of their children.
When Church leaders fail to exercise their teaching authority it becomes almost impossible for parents to exercise theirs. Why would a headteacher take any notice of Catholic parents when their sacred pastors are facilitating Relationships and Sex Education throughout the Province? The cancelling of Catholic parents through the capitulation of their bishops to the Government’s RSE agenda is a massive victory for the pro-abortion lobby and a catastrophic setback for all parents of all faiths and none throughout Northern Ireland.
The capitulation of the Catholic authorities to British Government policy is made even more clear in teaching materials openly published by the Catholic Schools’ Trustee Service.
Following the example of the Catholic Schools’ Trustee Service, St Louis Grammar School, a Catholic Voluntary Grammar School in Ballymena, carries on its website a “worry box” referring pupils to Childline, which is described as a “free and confidential 24-hour helpline for children in danger or distress”. Within a few clicks on the Childline website, any underage girl at St Louis Grammar School who may be considering abortion is informed, “You don’t have to talk to your parents but your doctor will encourage you to”, and on the same page, the website purports to tell children what abortion involves, without in any way pointing out the reality of the unborn child’s development, that abortion kills the developing child in the womb or that an abortion can have serious adverse effects on a mother’s physical and mental health.
Also on the same webpage, young people are directed to Brook Advisory Centres and the Family Planning Association, an affiliate of International Planned Parenthood Federation, the world’s largest abortion-promoting agency. Both of these organisations have pioneered the provision of abortion and contraception to underage children without parents’ consent. Having been signposted to Childline by St Louis Grammar School, young people who visit the website will find Childline informing them that, “It’s important to remember that nobody can define your sexuality except you” and offering them a choice of thirty different “genders” to which they might belong.
The Catholic authorities have failed to resist the Relationships and Sexuality Education (Northern Ireland) (Amendment) Regulations 2023, which deals with human activities directly relating to three of the ten commandments:
- The fourth commandment “Honour your father and mother” requiring parents, as primary educators, to educate their children to fulfil the moral law in order that they reach heaven;
- The sixth commandment, “You shall not commit adultery”, encompassing all transgressions of human sexuality, including contraception, lust, masturbation, homosexuality, cohabitation, and in vitro fertilisation;
- The fifth commandment, “You shall not kill”, covering all intentional killing of the innocent, such as abortion.
In Catholic teaching, intentionally breaking any of the commandments may involve the commission of mortal sin and, if not absolved, causing “exclusion from Christ’s kingdom and the eternal death of hell” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
In other words, there is a lot at stake — particularly for parents who are primarily responsible for the protection of their children — since, according to Catholic teaching, we will be judged on our duties of state. What can parents do? The only ones who, with God’s help, can ultimately defeat the British Government’s wicked objective, are parents who, currently, are the most vulnerable, after their children, to this unprecedented assault on the family itself.
This is the reality we face. Church leaders have long since abandoned ship, leaving families to their fate at the hands of life-destroying legislation. And they are not only abandoning Catholic families but all families in Northern Ireland and the integrity of the family as Christian civilisation has always known it.
The only conscientious and properly Catholic response to intrinsically evil legislation, such as a law promoting abortion, is resistance. We must all start building up that resistance now.