Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

Harmonisation legislation will take some time because it is difficult to harmonise a jurisdiction where the Queen is sovereign with one where citizens have written guarantees. There is an incompatibility between them. In my earlier reply I said that one cannot harmonise legislation with a country that does not provide its citizens with a basic guarantee of their reputation in the constitution, which therefore permits blacklists to be compiled about persons. We cannot go down that road in this jurisdiction. We are examining whether, as the Garda vetting report suggests, there is some other formula we can adopt, where in effect we assemble information about people who are deemed to be undesirable and give them some judicial right of appeal if they are found to be undesirable even though they have no criminal conviction. That is why I said it is a complex issue. I will bring proposals to Government on examining our child care legislation to see whether we can amend it to put on a statutory basis the approach that was suggested in the Ferns Report.

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