Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

The public wants to know if we can reassure it about the protection of their children from the vile degradations of sexual predators. That was the only issue. There is an important subsidiary issue, which is the position of victims. Victims and their families have received little attention in this debate. There have been vague promises of counselling but one hears mothers of such victims saying on the airwaves that the social services approached them two years later. We saw the two young women on television last night detail with unbelievable courage their unimaginable experience. Little attention has been given to that.

The Government has been scurrying, under pressure from the public, the Opposition and some of its own backbenchers, to find a political response to this situation. What we now have is not what was envisaged when the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform told us, invoking the name of the Chief Justice, to make haste slowly and that this was a complex matter. He has ended up doing a 180° turn on that.

The Labour Party consistently and from the beginning advocated the closing of this legal loophole and the inclusion of the defence of honest mistake to make the legislation compliant with the Constitution as an interim measure that would then enable this House and those outside it to discuss the more complicated and difficult questions associated with the age of consent. The Minister did not do that. He said our Bill was constitutionally infirm because it was not gender neutral. What has he now done? He has come up with legislation that is precisely that — not gender neutral.

He has, quite properly, exempted the young girl who becomes pregnant and becomes a teenage mother from prosecution, which is only right. However, the young boy can serve five years in Mountjoy Prison. No thought has been given to that. It is not gender neutral and if the Minister's original argument is right, for that reason it is suspect constitutionally.

I do not think many backbenchers, who are happy to go home this weekend at least feeling there has been some kind of response to the runaway horse we have seen in the past ten days, appreciate that in this Bill the Minister proposes that we treat with equal seriousness the situation of sexual activity between two young teenagers and sexual activity between a much older and a much younger person. They are not to be treated equally. I do not want to have anything in this House that encourages or approves the sexual activity of teenagers today. However, for us not to recognise it is to fool ourselves and to rush headlong into making a decision that is merely to try to pull back some credibility for the Government.

We ought to have proceeded with a two-stage approach. We ought to have enacted something similar to the Labour Party Bill if not the Bill itself to shut off that loophole and make it constitutionally safe. We could then have had the wider debate. I suspect that, for all his self-image, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform will not in the years ahead like to have the paternity of this legislation traced for public scrutiny. If he enacts it as he proposes to enact it today, it will be shown to have many anomalies and to have been a political response to a situation that requires a finessed legal response.

The Minister found out this week what it is to be the meat in the sandwich. When he found himself between Clara and Cahirciveen, he soon found out who drives the Government. He soon found out what it is like to be the meat in the sandwich.

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