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

I move amendment No. 38:

In page 30, after line 35, to insert the following: “30.The Minister shall, within 90 days of the passing of this Act, make regulations under section 60 of the Act of 2018 making it an offence to erase information regarding convictions for sexual offences as set out in section 3 of the Principal Act.”.

We are moving on to the two final amendments with regard to issues that we have discussed on Committee Stage. I have highlighted the first key weakness in my amendments earlier. The second key weakness is the failure to close off the loopholes that allow sex offenders to have their offences effectively forgotten through the change in the offender's name by deed poll or by using the Google right to be forgotten.

For the sake of victims who have to live with the consequences of these perpetrators and any potential future victims, those convicted of sexual offences should lose the right to be forgotten permanently. As I have said to the Minister, the only test that Google seems to apply to a request to be forgotten online and have the court reports erased is the length of time since the material went online. That is not in the public interest. Google does not consider what is in the public interest when it removes access to information about a court conviction permanently.

Regardless of any court conviction there should not be the possibility of having that information erased because, as the Minister knows, court hearings are to be held in public except in exceptional circumstances. The decisions are to be given in public. In general the names of those convicted are published and all of that information is now available through the electronic format. It is the main primary record of courts and public proceedings in this country. There is no legitimate reason the likes of Google should be allowed to remove those listings because it is an exploitation of EU privacy laws.

There is provision with the general data protection regulation, GDPR, privacy laws to ensure that the public interest is protected. GDPR, in circumstances where a convicted sex offender looks to have the record of his or her conviction erased, allows for a situation to arise where Google and other organisations can refuse to erase that information but that does not apply here. Google, to date, has defended its handling of requests to delist articles relating to such criminal convictions on the basis of the amount of time since the conviction took place. That is the only consideration it is giving to this. That is not satisfactory or good enough.

I ask that the Minister take a proactive approach to this by bringing Google and other relevant organisations into the Department and making it crystal clear to them that we will not tolerate their allowing happen a situation in which the records of sex offenders are delisted from Google searches or any other similar organisation. This is a further abuse of the victims of these crimes in that the stories have been erased.

Unfortunately, a huge degree of pressure is put on victims, albeit inadvertently, to waive anonymity in many cases so it can be ensured the sex offender is named. It is wrong, after the victim has gone through that trauma and released their name into the public domain so the names of the perpetrators could be exposed and published, for them to find out down the road the likes of Google has delisted that. That is a far greater abuse again. We, as a country, and the Minister, in her role, need to ensure this practice is stopped immediately and that those records remain permanently available.

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