An Irish organization’s ad took the notion of consent to the point of self-parody.
The culture of radical autonomy and consent above all other values has run amok to the point of self-parody in Ireland. The Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s We-Consent project has issued — and now pulled — a public-service-type announcement on social media cautioning grandparents against hugging their grandchildren without express consent.
The ad tells us:
Not everyone wants a hug. Even from the people who love them.
And closes with:
Awkward? Maybe. Important? Absolutely.
🇮🇪 The Irish state has published an advert discouraging grandparents from hugging their grandchildren, as part of a campaign designed to promote "consent". pic.twitter.com/mQKRn8Dvu3
— Europa.com (@europa) October 21, 2026
As you can see in the X post here, yesterday many attributed this message to the Irish government. Knowing that’s not the case, that the organization responsible for the video is dedicated to supporting victims of rape, is more disturbing to me.
The video has been pulled on account of negativity, though the organization stands by the grandparent scenario as something legit.
The organisation said it created a video series for its social media channels based on feedback from over 20 consent workshops with younger and older people.
“Part of the workshops involved sharing participants’ own experiences of instances when they felt uncomfortable,” it said.
“The scenarios depicted in the video series came up very frequently in all the workshops. The videos were created with volunteers and staff and reflected these conversations.”
It should be said that we can overdo hugs. Covid pulled it back a bit — even still — but we have even a quasi-professional networking culture where there’s an understood pressure to hug. It’s a more intimate greeting than we let on, and for anyone who has had a negative experience of a physical “boundary violation” — a phrase I hate because it is so vague and can mean way too many things — it can be jarring. We should be sensitive to this. Sometimes a smile and wave — an air hug? — is all that’s needed.
We absolutely must be more vigilant in protecting children from actual harm — which usually (hopefully) does not implicate their grandparents.
At the same time, we’ve learned some helpful things from old-school therapy culture that we should know instinctively — and perhaps we do, until it is beaten out of us: Children need affection. Grandparents are the natural people to give it to them.
Rape is a real thing. So is adult abuse of children that falls short of that. Don’t distract from evil with nonsense commercials.