Niamh Regan
Researcher and writer on gender and education
Dr. Niamh Regan brings an Irish academic lens to one of the most contested policy shifts in the country's primary schools. Her conversation with Stella O'Malley unpacks the Cineáltas anti-bullying framework and asks whether Ireland's classrooms are the right place to settle questions that remain unresolved in law, medicine and public debate.
Dr. Niamh Regan is an Irish researcher whose work examines the intersection of gender ideology, education policy and civil liberties. She has written critically about the cultural and institutional pressures reshaping how Irish schools approach identity, expression and behaviour — often before those shifts have received meaningful public scrutiny or democratic debate.
In the Beyond Gender episode 'Bí Cineálta': From 'Be Kind' to Thought Crime (March 2026), she joined Stella O'Malley to examine Ireland's Cineáltas framework — the government anti-bullying initiative that has placed 'Bí Cineálta', Be Kind, at the centre of primary school life nationwide. Regan argues that the phrase, however warm on the surface, functions as an ideological lever: quietly redefining what counts as harmful speech and what counts as acceptable belief, in ways that carry real constitutional implications for Irish families and their children.
For Irish listeners the conversation is acutely relevant. Primary schooling is compulsory, Bunreacht na hÉireann protects the rights of parents in their children's education, and the Cineáltas rollout has proceeded largely without public deliberation about its deeper premises. Regan brings those premises into view, asking who decided that certain viewpoints constitute bullying, and on what authority schools are being asked to enforce that definition.
Her willingness to name what others prefer to leave implicit makes her a valuable voice in the Irish gender debate — one who insists that kindness and intellectual honesty are not opposites, and that the cost of conflating them falls hardest on children.
