I was originally intending to talk today about rural communities but I now find myself compelled to respond to the comments made by An Taoiseach yesterday where he confirmed his belief that children could be transgender. His belief is one matter. I will not spend time here going into the long list of objections raised by many medical and psychological professionals to the unthinking acceptance of children self-identifying their gender and the huge potential dangers this causes when it leads to medical intervention such as puberty blockers. I have made that case many times before in this Chamber.

What was particularly galling was the Taoiseach's assertion that we should not get into culture wars such as those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. First, I absolutely object to the hand-waving on this issue as a culture war issue. It is not. It is a medical issue. It is an issue of child welfare and even scientific truth. It is one thing if we have raging debates over political correctness and over people being cancelled for offensive jokes, or about what is and is not acceptable in public discourse or media. That is all culture, and debating it is culture war. However, there is nothing merely cultural about young people who are suffering from infertility or osteoporosis, or having to live with the irreversible reality of sex-change surgeries. That is real, life-ruining medical damage. Would the Taoiseach call the scoliosis crisis a culture war issue? Of course not.

Second, the Taoiseach acts as if we are just now being dragged into a culture war, yet his party has uncritically backed puberty blockers for children, men in women's prisons and women's sports, and erasing women from the Constitution despite, as we saw in the referendums, huge opposition to these things. Far from avoiding a culture war, Ireland has been deeply engaged in one for years. The Taoiseach's Government, his party and his coalition party Fine Gael have been driving it for years. I ask the Leader to invite the Taoiseach to come in here and deal with that issue.