Under the Equal Status Acts, if a teacher permits you to be harassed because you are gay (“Miss, Andy’s a fuckin’ faggot“; “Please Michael, I don’t like bad langaue in my class“; “Sorry miss. He’s a bleedin’ faggot, then.“), you have the right to take the teacher and the school to the Equality Tribunal. And that is – legally – a lot easier than a court case, not only in lodging the papers, but in the way a case is heard and dealt with.

I predict it will take only one student to send a shock through the system. I]m not suggesting that it would be easy to be that one student, but I reckon of the thouseands of second level students, there must be one who, if told their legal rights and how (relatively) easy it is to take action to enforce them, would have the gumption to take their school and the teacher who has turned a blind eye to what was going on and look for compensation.