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

I am disappointed with the Minister's response regarding an issue which I believe is fundamental to this Bill. The Minister is looking at this issue from a particular perspective, but if we turn it on its head and look at it from the opposite perspective, rather than looking at this provision and how it facilitates sex offenders, it will be seen it is not limiting them to the local Garda station. What the Minister is saying to a convicted sex offender, who must be monitored and who poses a high risk in the community, is that he or she can go to any Garda station in the country, in Wexford town, for example, present there and tell the gardaí in that station that he or she is going to live in rural west Roscommon. The offender in that case will have complied with the law. The difficulty is that it will be the Garda members in Roscommon who will have seven days from that point to try to track down that individual and have him or her present himself or herself in the Garda station in Castlerea to provide his or her fingerprints and photographs.

This is a mechanism to ensure sex offenders remain underground, those that deliberately want to remain underground. What we need, and what we must have in the legislation, is a legal requirement that a sex offender must attend his or her local Garda station when registering and not some far-flung location somewhere else around the country, because it is the local Garda members who will be responsible for monitoring this individual. I refer to the Minister saying everything will be okay if a sex offender were to go to Wexford town to register because an activity report on the PULSE system will be circulated to every garda in the country who is monitoring sex offenders. These gardaí get hundreds of notifications. The Minister is asking them to sift through these hundreds of notifications and to identify a new individual who has moved into their area and who is trying to remain underground and trying to conceal his identity so it will not be monitored.

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