Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the publication of this legislation and the fact we are debating it here at long last. It is 13 years since the then Government committed to bringing in this Bill.

The Minister's predecessor, Mr. Dermot Ahern, told me in reply to a parliamentary question on 22 April 2009 that unless we reformed the notification process here in this country in tandem with what had been done in the UK, our jurisdiction would become a safe haven for convicted sex offenders. Sadly, I believe, over the past 13 years, that has happened.

The Bill will close off quite a number of dangerous loopholes that are currently within the existing legislation, particularly in terms of the management and monitoring of high-risk sex offenders. The current law left that system completely open to abuse and people who wanted to avoid detection could easily do so. This legislation will ensure for the first time in this country we have an effective sex offenders register, and that is a very positive development.

I also believe the provisions in the legislation to create a legislative basis for the assessment and management of risk posed by sex offenders, the disclosure of information by An Garda Síochána regarding someone who is on the sex offenders register, and the Garda being able to apply for the discharge or variation of a sex offender's order are welcome and I would hope these new powers will ensure many of those who are convicted of serious sexual offences will avail of the treatment and support services within the Irish Prison Service. Many sex offenders today are rejecting treatment despite the fact that treatment services have been expanded. Only one in eight sex offenders avails of treatment in prison even though, as I say, there has been an expansion of the capacity of the treatment services being offered to sex offenders, both in Arbour Hill and in the Midlands Prison in Laois. According to research by the psychology unit within the Irish Prison Service, availing of those courses reduces the risk of reoffending by three and a half times.

In 2009, when the Department of Justice carried out the review of the current legislation on the sentencing, treatment and monitoring of sex offenders, it recommended making early release of sex offenders conditional on their engagement with the treatment programmes. This needs to be reflected in this legislation. Such a system is in place in Vermont in the United State, which is one of the benchmark states globally in terms of the management of sex offenders, where sex offenders are not eligible for parole unless they have availed of treatment in prison.

There is a key inadequacy in the new law before us. While I welcome that it provides the right to information, limited though it is, and we will deal with this in more detail on Committee Stage, the big weakness in this legislation is that it fails to address both analogue and digital rights to be forgotten by convicted sex offenders. This is a fundamental weakness in the legislation. For the sake of the victims who have to live with the consequences of those perpetrators' actions and any potential future victims, those convicted of sexual offences should lose the right to be forgotten permanently.

There are two aspects to this. The first relates to the right to be forgotten online. We have seen recent press coverage of activities of criminals who were behind multimillion euro vice rings being forgotten by Google following requests under the EU privacy law. Google has also delisted news articles relating to convictions for sexual offences, including court reports on men convicted of possessing child sexual abuse material. It is completely unacceptable that court reports are being wiped away online. The idea behind our court system is that this takes place in public and that information is available to the public, yet here we have these guilty parties now applying for requests and exploiting the privacy laws. That must not be tolerated. On the operation of the right to be forgotten, the European Court of Justice decision in 2014 established the right to request that Internet search engines delist links containing information about them that is inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive. I do not believe that information regarding sexual offenders falls under any of those four thresholds. It should not be tolerated. There is not an absolute right to be forgotten and it must be balanced against public interest factors. It is in the public interest that that information remains available to the public because it is vital information. We cannot airbrush away the stories of these victims. It is wrong. It is a further abuse of these victims. We must ensure that will not happen.

Google has defended its handling of the request to delist these articles about criminal convictions for sexual offences and organising prostitution. It has stated it is only in compliance with the guidelines set down by the European Commission and it is doing so based on the amount of time that has passed since the article was first published. That is not an acceptable threshold to be used to consider this. There is relevant vital information that must remain in the public domain, not only to protect future potential victims but also to protect the rights, the narrative and the story of victims of these convicted sex offenders.

The other right to be forgotten is in terms of sex offenders changing their names through deed poll. There have been quite extensive reports in the United Kingdom where the use of deed polls has been abused by registered sex offenders to change their names, about which they do not inform the police authorities there or An Garda Síochána here, and they go under the radar again. While registered sex offenders are required to notify the Garda - within seven days at present and three days after this law is enacted - of a change in name, the onus is on the sex offender to report that change in information. That, as we know, does not work today. Sex offenders are supposed to inform An Garda Síochána of their address within seven days and of any subsequent change to that within seven days, and as we know, we have breach after breach, week after week, of that basic condition that is left out there at present. As a result, people are literally disappearing off the radar by changing their names by deed poll and not informing An Garda Síochána.

In the UK, sex offenders have in many instances changed their names without informing officials. It is quite common for this to happen and I suspect the same is the case here in Ireland. Sky News, in a report, found numerous cases in the British courts where names have been changed but the individuals were the same as the ones who had carried out similar offences previously. The report goes on to talk about the case of Terry Price, who conducted a string of sexual offences over three decades and had changed his name five times in an effort to cover up his recurring pattern of behaviour. Price was even allowed to change his name while he was in prison.

We need to ensure that this law is amended to protect the victims and to ensure that the perpetrators of these crimes do not have the right to be forgotten, to change their name or to try and circumvent the sex offender register, as they have consistently done up to now.

I will return to the issue of disclosure. It is great to see the change of mind on the principle of disclosure. It is very significant that it is being put onto the Statute Book and into legislation for the first time. I am concerned that it does not go far enough. As the Minister will know, I published a Bill in 2012 which was accepted on Second Stage in 2013. It provided for far more extensive disclosure that balanced the rights of parents and those protecting children and, at the same time, the rights of the convicted offender. I hope that on Committee Stage, the Minister will revisit the wording I proposed in 2012.

There has been a right to disclose to the public in the UK for a considerable time. Disclosures about registered child sex offenders were made in just 7% of cases directly impacting on 60 children. More interesting is that it also led to other actions, including referrals to the children's social care services, in 27% of cases. The British Home Office research suggested that the police and other criminal justice agencies had seen benefits in the formalisation of the process, which led to the provision of increased intelligence and the provision of a better route for the public to make inquiries about their concerns. In this country, we need to change the attitude in relation to reporting suspicious activity. As a population, we are slow to report our concerns to An Garda Síochána and we tend to leave it to somebody else. Sometimes that decision has devastating consequences for victims. Sadly, in many instances, we are talking about children here.

I will give three examples of what I am talking about. I put this on the record previously but I will revisit it today. There were three incidents in counties Louth and Dublin involving strangers approaching children on streets and at playgrounds. This highlights the need for us to look again at what type of disclosure we are prepared to introduce. In the first case in Dunleer in County Louth, a stranger pulled alongside a playground and called out a boy's name as he played with friends. In another incident in Monasterboice, again in County Louth, a man in a van called out to children on a Sunday afternoon. The previous month, Gardaí investigated a third case, at Lansdowne Road in Dublin, where boys of ten and 11 years of age were approached by a stranger driving a black car. That was only reported to the Gardaí some time later. This exposes the lack of reporting of suspicious activity. In the Dunleer incident, the individual in question had to have done some preparatory work in obtaining details about the particular child. Did these inquiries not raise a suspicion at an earlier stage and why were they not acted upon? It took ten days for the Dublin incident to be reported to An Garda Síochána. We need to send out a clear message to the public that they should report all suspicious activity. The best way to do that is by encouraging parents to report suspicious activity on the basis of giving the gardaí the right under certain limited circumstances to disclose relevant information to parents. I believe it is important that we look at the wording of this legislation regarding disclosure.

The work I have put into having this Bill published and hopefully enacted is down to the efforts of one individual, now-retired Sergeant John Hynes, who was based in Castlerea, County Roscommon but is from County Mayo. I want to publicly acknowledge his work in trying to progress this particular legislation. John, who was responsible within An Garda Síochána for enforcing and monitoring sex offenders, was so frustrated about the lack of progress in dealing with the anomalies within the current legislation that he spoke out about it and pointed out the weaknesses within the legislation. There is no doubt that in my part of the country and many other parts of the west, there are individuals, some of whom are in prison today, who would never have been put in prison or convicted were it not for the Trojan efforts of the now-retired Sergeant John Hynes. I refer not only to his day-to-day work and that of his Garda colleagues throughout the region, but also to the support he gave me when he helped me to progress my primary legislation in 2012. I have continued to make efforts since then to try to bring about this legislation to reform the laws in this area. I look forward to working with the Minister over the coming weeks. It would be a great Christmas present to see this legislation enacted before the end of the year.

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