Over the past decade, sexual consent has become a focus for addressing both positive and negative sexual rights in higher education in Ireland (Gruskin et al., 2019). The University of Galway’s Active* Consent programme has pioneered sexual consent education and research with young people throughout Ireland since 2013, reaching over 100,000 higher education students since 2019 (MacNeela et al., 2024). Now a national programme, it has adopted a culture change and socio-ecological approach to promoting consensual relationships and the prevention of sexual violence and harassment (Dills et al., 2016). The programme ethos is that consent is ongoing, mutual, and freely given—for everyone, in all relationships, across genders and sexual orientations, and for each form of intimacy, if or when someone chooses to become intimate. While this positive goal guides our programming, we also address the sexual violence and harassment still commonly experienced by young people in Ireland today (Burke et al., 2020, 2023; Dawson et al., 2024). Our multidisciplinary team incorporates expertise from disciplines including psychology, health promotion, social work, theatre and drama, nursing, and psychotherapy. The programme incorporates methods such as storytelling to present realistic and contextual consent scenarios to workshop participants and theatre audiences, engaging them in discussion and critical reflection (McIvor, 2017). Working with partners including Galway Rape Crisis Centre, our initiatives are organised in a tiered, spiral model, taking a learning community from brief messaging through social media and posters, to workshops and arts-based interventions, and on to specialised training for staff members and community leaders. As an applied research and implementation programme, Active* Consent has encountered significant challenges, which have required a learning and development approach in response. We have been fortunate to operate during a period marked by progressive policy changes and increased sectoral resourcing, yet the ambitious project of culture change in higher education requires all staff and students to engage with consent education. The sector has further challenges to meet before we can say whether policymakers, advocates, higher education communities, and programmes such as Active* Consent, will achieve a long-lasting, impactful realisation of the positive potential of consent education.