Sex Education for Four-year-olds?

Sex education for children of four – to halt teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease? Eleven Members of Parliament have called for such a measure.

Daft? Maybe. Yet my childhood recollections are that country children were indeed instructed in practical sex education from an early age through observing animal husbandry.

We Dubliners, as city kids, were generally amazed at the intricate knowledge of animal – and thus human - biology possessed by the “culchies” (disparaging word for country yokels, derived from the remote, but charming, townland of Kiltimagh in Co Mayo).

Sex education was imparted to me by a country girl who had seen the birds and the bees while we city jackeens were wrapped in that cotton wool known as “respectability”, along with a fine coating of Love and Romance from sugary American movies.

The practical, down-to-earth expertise acquired by these rural schoolchildren sometimes gave them a robustly realistic view of the mating game. Our current dainty horror of date rape and “sexual harassment” would be scorned by shrewd country girls who had seen with their own eyes the aggressive uncontrollability of the bull and the stallion when aroused. Such lassies knew from rustic experience that a strong and reckless young man with drink on him was no more to be trusted than a bull in a meadow.

The country kids had, from an early age, a basic understanding of what theologians call “the Natural Law”. If country priests were sometimes strict about reining in the natural law, it was because they, too, had observed what stern control was required for the bull and the stallion.

The Irish resistance to birth control and abortion were not just church-imposed ideas, either. In agricultural life, barrenness and infertility equated “failure”. If a cow failed to calf, they said the cow had an abortion: it was failure: it was a mess: and it was costly in terms of husbandry and future generational investment. That notion prevailed, and deep down, still does.