Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming in. I will have to leave for a priority question in the Chamber. I will be back but I am sorry for the disruption.

This is an incredibly important discussion, and a really difficult one because there is nothing like sex crimes, particularly in relation to children, to raise the hair on the back of everybody's neck and get everybody up in arms. We know that, because of the abhorrence of the crime, identifiable sex offenders have been beaten up, targeted, driven out of their homes and all the rest of it in massive scare tactics which actually do not do anything at all to protect anybody. It is that gut reaction.

These items of legislation dealing with known sex offenders, in other words a tiny minority of the people who commit sex crimes, in the manner in which we have heard evidence today, probably do so in an ineffective way. It is difficult to police. Are we wrong to table these now in a piecemeal approach? Are we giving the illusion that such legislation gives a protection it in fact does not? Would society not be better served by having that broader discussion of the supports that are necessary to try to find out why people commit these crimes and how we can address that? Is the legislation, in that sense, premature and unhelpful? On its own, what will it achieve? That might be a bit dramatic, but I throw it out there.