The ICCL Puts Children Last
Sandra Adams on the Irish Council for Civil Rights' new trans and non-binary "rights guide."
“The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.” — A. E. Housman
On January 16th, The Irish Times published a front-page article under the headline: “Watchdog says schools must use students’ preferred pronouns”. The report outlined the contents of a “rights guide” for people who identify as trans and non-binary published by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL). The headline got two important things wrong. The ICCL is not a watchdog. It has no regulatory power to direct, discipline, or compel anyone to do anything. And more importantly, there is no legislation or case law in Ireland requiring anyone to use “preferred pronouns” in any setting.
The guide in question, Know Your Rights: A guide for trans and non-binary people, contains some information that is accurate and useful. It explains anti-discrimination principles, healthcare entitlements, privacy, and data protection law. What is striking, however, is what it fails to say about the most important legal framework governing anyone who works with children: the Children First Act 2015.
Children First is a proactive safeguarding regime. Its logic is intentionally conservative: reduce opportunities for harm, remove ambiguity, and prioritise the welfare and dignity of all children. To comply with the Act, schools and organisations must maintain a Child Safeguarding Statement, conduct risk assessments, design procedures to manage identified risks, train staff, maintain reporting pathways, and embed safeguarding into everyday governance and culture.
The ICCL guide refers to the Children First Act only once, in the context of a teacher’s obligation to report concerns to Tusla, the State agency with primary responsibility for child protection and welfare. It states: “A school should not disclose your trans identity to your parent(s) or guardian(s) if it would put you at risk of harm, and your welfare should be paramount.” But what, in this context, is supposed to constitute “harm”? A parent’s refusal to affirm a child’s claim that they were “born in the wrong body”?
In the Children First Act, harm is not a vague concept. It refers to serious abuse, neglect, or ill-treatment that significantly impairs a child’s welfare. Parental disagreement, caution, or a decision not to affirm a child’s beliefs about their identity does not come close to meeting that threshold. This framing also ignores the UK Cass Review, which concluded that the evidence base for medical interventions such as puberty blockers is weak and uncertain, and that “social transition” should not be treated as a neutral or consequence-free step.
By invoking Tusla and child-protection law in this way, the guide reframes ordinary tension within a family about how best to respond to a child’s distress as a potential child-protection issue. That is not what Irish safeguarding law provides for, and suggesting that it is risks badly misleading parents, children and schools about when the State should intervene in family life.
The ICCL is not obliged to reproduce the Children First Act in full, but a reasonable person might expect it to reflect its reality. The views of the ICCL and NGOs working in this area carry moral authority. Their guidance is taken as an indicator of “what is expected” by principals, teachers, boards, journalists and politicians. Their output influences policy and makes its way onto newspapers’ front pages. But if that guidance is wrong, the courts and Tusla will not ask whether a school followed an advocacy group’s guidance. They will ask whether it complied with Children First, identified foreseeable risks, and took proportionate steps to reduce them.
This is not an abstract concern. The highest-risk settings in any school are well known: toilets, changing rooms, sleeping accommodation, and any environment involving partial undress or unsupervised vulnerability. If a school treats the ICCL’s assertion that students who identify as trans or non-binary “should be able to” use facilities matching gender identity as if it were a legal right, without carefully weighing the rights of other pupils to privacy and dignity, the legal risk falls on the school, not on the ICCL. The ICCL is acutely aware of where the responsibility lies, and that is presumably why it added a disclaimer at the bottom of 146 of the guides’ 148 pages: “This guide is for your information only. It is not intended to be a substitute for legal advice.” That warning protects the authors, not those who act on it.
This guide wasn’t produced on the margins. It was written and researched by the Transgender Equality Network of Ireland( TENI) and ShoutOut, part-funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC), with input from bodies including Free Legal Aid Centres (FLAC) and the Irish Penal Reform Trust. It was reviewed by A&L Goodbody, one of the most prestigious law firms in the country. This is not the work of amateurs, and that is precisely what makes its failure to state the law accurately so serious.
The ICCL isn’t the first to produce such a guide. In 2022, the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) advised employers that staff who identify as the opposite sex “should” be permitted to use opposite-sex facilities. This kind of guidance exposes employers to serious legal risk under the Equal Status Acts if female employees believe their privacy, dignity or safety has been compromised. But how many women will challenge it? Advice of this sort creates a chilling effect, because institutions and individuals assume the law is already settled and that resistance is too professionally or financially dangerous.
The ICCL debacle has demonstrated that the pen is mightier than the sword, but not in the way the phrase is usually meant. A steady accumulation of “guides”, policies, academic papers, and newspaper articles has accomplished what legislation and litigation could not. In their book Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay describe this phenomenon as ‘discursive capture’. Change the manuals. Change the training. Change the guidance. Change the headlines. And reality will follow.
On January 22nd, almost one week after the original article was published, The Irish Times reported that the Department of Education had rejected the ICCL’s claim, confirming that “no guidelines have been issued” to schools and that no such obligation to use “preferred pronouns” exists. When asked for comment, the ICCL did not correct the record. Instead, it said: “It is ICCL’s assessment, confirmed by legal advice received while drafting the guide, that schools must use students’ correct pronouns… This led ICCL to conclude that schools must use a student’s correct name and pronoun in day-to-day interactions.”
The ICCL’s rhetorical backpedaling is shameless. The guide insisted on “preferred” pronouns. When contradicted, the ICCL shifted to “correct” pronouns. In this context, “correct” does not mean true in any objective sense. It means “the words you are expected to use,” that is, the polite or compliant form. The demands remain the same. When asked by the Irish Times about the nature of their legal review of the ‘rights guide’ a spokeswoman for A&L Goodbody said it would not be commenting.
Doing the right thing by women and children does not mean denying dignity to people who identify as trans or non-binary. It is not a zero-sum game. But safeguarding depends on clarity, consistency and a steadfast focus on rules not preferences. The Children First Act reflects that reality. The ICCL guide does not.
As for consequences? There will likely be none. It will be business as usual. A.E. Housman, it seems, was right: “The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.”
Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.