In her provocatively-titled book Female Chauvinist Pigs, Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, US author and journalist Ariel Levy makes the point that, in an age where pre-teen girls have questionable role models such as Paris Hilton and reality TV stars for whom sex is a commodity;

"fwe should stop focusing all of our attention on sexual intercourse at the expense of educating our children about sexuality as a larger, more complex, more fundamental part of being human. Importuning them to be virgins isn't working; what do we have to lose?"

She makes the point that teenage sex doesn't vary across the developed world but teen pregnancy in the US (where preaching abstinence is considered adequate sex education under the Bush administration) is relatively high at 80 per 1,000 annually, and is on a par with less developed nations such as Belarus, Bulgaria and Romania. This is compared to the Netherlands at 40 per 1,000 annually (where the age of consent is 16).

Even though Ireland has a much lower population, teenage (15-19 year olds) pregnancy was still at 25 per 1, ,000 in 2001.

Why is there still such a dearth of knowledge amongst Irish teenagers, 22 years after the tragic, lonely deaths of Ann Lovett and her baby in Granard?

Fiona Neary, executive director of the Rape Crisis Network Ireland says that Irish society is failing its teenagers with regards to sex education. Neary says that we're in a very different environment now to the one that prevailed in the early 1980s.

"We're now bombarded with sexual images; back then we didn't have that kind of wallpaper of sexual images, we were terribly Catholic and there was no sex at allf but what we're still missing is a compulsory education package in schools, which parents have to sign up to as well."

Neary does not agree that the age of consent should be lowered from 17. "We're not blind to the fact that teenagers under the age of 17 are sexually active, and what we're proposing is that, in any new legislation, these kind of relationships are recognised."

She is adamant that young teenagers do not have the capacity to consent to sex.

"You hear all this rubbish about how some children are more mature than others; but you're talking about the mental capacity to be that sophisticated, and 12- and 13-year olds don't have thatf and 14- or 15- year olds don't have it, " she says.

The thorny issue of consent is seldom covered in schools, Neary says, which is a major failing on the part of Irish society.

"Within the social, personal and health education programmes in schools, the sections on consent are not compulsory and teachers tend to avoid them because of the complexity of consent issues, " she says. "So in an environment when more and more teenagers are getting their signals and information from the pornography industry and pornography-driven advertising, we are not equipping them to stand up to that kind of pressure."

Dr John Sharry, a child and family psychotherapist who has written a book called Bringing Up Responsible Teenagers (Veritas), says that although younger teenagers may have sex without it affecting them adversely, an age of consent is a good idea as it sets a societal norm. "Early sexual experience is associated with a whole range of later problems. Obviously there are going to be people who do it before, but that age of consent moves other people to do it a bit later, " he says.

"I do think that section 1.1 of the criminal law amendment act 1935 was outdated; it wasn't sophisticated enough to deal with the complex area of young teenagers. I'd say young people in Ireland are engaging in sex earlier than they were a generation ago; that's pretty well accepted and there's more of a societal acceptance of that."