Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

——a completed act of sexual penetration compared with some other form of sexual deviancy with a child. Therefore, there would be a peculiar position if we started erecting defences now to this particular offence without going down the road of providing an explicit defence for sexual assault cases as well. I am trying to contain the entire operation. Unless one contains the legislation, this is a little like a chain of dominos in a room where if one pushes one and it falls and hits another, the implications grow ever wider.

Let us be clear that the Supreme Court decision in the CC case rotated around the seriousness of the offence and the fact that there had to be mens rea and that excluding mens rea was an unconstitutional approach. We are now in the position that the law relating to what used to be called indecent assault and which is now sexual assault is subject to the honest belief defence. If that is the case in sexual assault, it must be the case in relation to this offence as well. For instance, if one was soliciting a child over the Internet or over a phone to have sexual intercourse with one, the prosecution would have to prove that one knew one was dealing with a child. There could not be a situation where one sent a text message, it landed on a child's phone and that fact alone put one in a position of proving the reasonableness of one's view or whatever.

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