Niamh Regan
Academic and parental rights campaigner
Dr. Niamh Regan is an Irish academic who came to wider attention through her close examination of Ireland's Bí Cineálta 'Be Kind' framework — revealing how schools across Europe are quietly sidelining constitutional parental rights under the cover of anti-bullying policy.
Dr. Niamh Regan joined Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman on Beyond Gender for "Bí Cineálta": From 'Be Kind' to Thought Crime (March 2026), an episode that cuts to the heart of a question increasingly urgent for European parents: what authority does a school have over a child's beliefs, and where exactly does that authority end?
Bí Cineálta — Irish for 'be kind' — is Ireland's national anti-bullying framework for schools. On the surface it promotes dignity and respect; in practice, Regan's experience as a parent exposed something more troubling. Schools, she argues, treat constitutional parental rights as procedural box-ticking rather than a genuine limit on institutional power. The framework's working definitions of bullying and harassment shade into the regulation of opinion — creating what the episode's title calls 'thought crime' territory, where a child's expressed hesitation about received orthodoxy can be treated as a safeguarding problem.
For continental European listeners, Regan's analysis travels directly. The episode traces how Bí Cineálta and frameworks like it are not organic national inventions but products of coordinated lobbying by international NGOs, adapted and exported across member states. The same architecture is visible in Dutch school-diversity programmes, Swedish normkritik curricula, and French éducation à l'égalité guidance — frameworks that similarly expand the school's moral jurisdiction while narrowing the space for parental dissent.
Regan brings a precise, academically grounded lens to this terrain, mapping the gap between the constitutional language of parental rights and the administrative reality that families actually encounter. Her contribution to Beyond Gender is a lucid case study in how ideologically charged policy travels across borders — and in how parents, wherever they are in Europe, can begin to name and push back against it.
