The most recent and comprehensive survey of sexual activity in Ireland carried out by the Economic and Social Research Institute and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, for all its flaws, provided a detailed picture of the sex life of this country.

Tellingly, it was commissioned by the Crisis Pregnancy Agency. It shows that the age at which most people first have sex in this country today is now 17 . . . about six years younger than 40 years ago.

But with greater sexual activity at an ever younger age there come many problems, most of which are not being tackled effectively.

This was highlighted with the publication last week of the report of the all-party Oireachtas committee on child protection. Its main aim was to resolve the crisis caused by the Supreme Court earlier this year when it ruled statutory rape law was unconstutitonal.

The committee recommends a referendum so that all sex with under 16s be outlawed and ringfenced with an "absolute zone of protection, " so that ignorance of age cannot be used as a defence. These recommendations need to be acted upon speedily as does the finding that sex with under 18s by adults in authority should also be outlawed.

There is a general agreement on these issues . . . but predictable controversy over the recommendation to lower the age of sexual consent to 16 for both boys and girls in order to decriminalise sexual experimentation among young people.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny's horrified reaction reveals deep differences among the political parties. Labour party spokesman Brendan Howlin has said "the age of consent is not the age of acceptability."

This nuance will no doubt be lost on the young people who already find it hard to resist the peer pressure to have sex at an early age: if something is legal then, logically, it's okay to do it.

The consequences of youthful sexual activity do not make a decision to lower the age of consent an easy one to make.

Last year, for example, the number of mothers under 19 was 2,477, slightly lower than the previous year, but still a substantial number of young women who have barely been able to define their independence from their own families except in a sexual way now finding themselves responsible for a family of their own.

The number of abortions among teenagers was 655 last year.

The number of under 19s contracting a sexually transmitted infection was, according to the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, 1,174 . . .

with ano-genital warts, chlamydia and nonspecific urethritis the most common diseases in descending order of occurrence.

All this happened with the current age of consent. Increasing it to 60 years of age will not, of course, prevent any of these problems, nor will lowering it to 16.

Teenagers live in a world where everything they do, from how they dress to how they talk and how they communicate to each other, has become sexualised.

Rather like the pressure to drink, the pressure on youngsters to become sexually active is everywhere . . . from the more rigorously controlled subject matter of soaps and films, to the eye-wateringly explicit music videos, and the uncensored outpourings of Myspace, Youtube and Bebo, the message is no longer a subtext: it's totally, as the teens might put it, out there.

Sex is something to engage in early, and often.

This country is in the middle of an extraordinary period of transition in which economic, social and religious mores and values are still fermenting. Long, hard battles had to be fought to wrench the tentacles of the Catholic church from so much of our legislation, from contraception to divorce to homosexual rights.

But as we have thrown out the taboos and prohibitions of the old Ireland, have we also been too slow in rebuilding an inclusive, protective value system for the new, multicultural and more secular Ireland that we are becoming?

It's entirely predictable that we will have long and bitter arguments about the age of consent. The pity is, the debate needs to be about so much more.