Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am greatly encouraged to see that Deputy Ó Snodaigh takes the same approach to volunteering as I do, which is that we do enough public service here. I cannot be baking tray-bakes and that. Perhaps when the electorate decides I need more time to bake tray-bakes and volunteer in different ways, I will spend my time doing that as well. In the meantime, I feel like I have a pass and now I feel legitimate in taking that approach considering it is Deputy Ó Snodaigh's approach as well. Excellent.

That being said, we are all here to do the same thing: to try to improve a vetting process and make it more efficient while being very effective. I do not have much space for the attitude that "I could not be bothered for a three-week camp" and so on. We cannot allow that sort of language to slip into this discourse at all. We know that predators, particularly predators of children, deliberately target vulnerable groups and sports groups. They do so in a deliberate and predatory way. They move from club to club, from community to community. The fact of having multiple addresses is inconvenient for a good person to whom this has never even occurred, but multiple addresses are a shield for the abuser as well.

Yes, we all want to do the same thing, totally in good faith, for the right reasons. I believe we are all having the same conversation. However, I remember back to the circumstances of the introduction of this legislation in 2012. I remember working with Frances Fitzgerald and Alan Shatter at that time. We brought in a suite of child protection measures. We provided for the creation of the Child and Family Agency, the precursor to Tusla. Before that, children's services were stuck in the HSE. I still recall the horror of the Tracey Fay report, published, I think, in 2010, and the failures by the HSE and management in the HSE in respect of children's services at that time. While there have been difficulties since then, of course, the creation of Tusla was an enormous step forward in terms of the focus on child protection. The children's referendum in 2012 enabled the State to intervene in family situations in a way that it felt it could not prior to that. It changed the balance to put the best interests of the child at the centre of the Irish Constitution to create children as individual rights-holders in and of themselves, as opposed to in a manner deriving from the fact of being in a family. That was a deeply significant, rights-based step forward by Alan Shatter, Frances Fitzgerald and the Government at the time. I refer also to the Garda vetting Bill of 2012 from the Department of Justice; the Criminal Justice (Withholding of Information on Offences against Children and Vulnerable Persons) Act 2012 that Alan Shatter brought in; and the Children First guidelines which were placed on a statutory basis in 2011 and, crucially, put mandatory reporting on a statutory basis.

The first document given to me when I came in to work in the Department of health and children was the Cloyne report, which details sexual abuse in the Catholic church up to 2007 and 2008 in the Cloyne diocese in County Cork. I could not understand how, in the wake of that report, there was any resistance by any organisation to put the mandatory reporting of an offence against a child on a statutory basis. I could not understand it. I remember the argument advanced by the Catholic Church at the time, which was that it would breach the seal of the confessional. Even if they were trying to win the argument, it was the wrong argument. There was a constitutionally based argument they could have used. It was the wrong argument but it was so gross to advance any argument against the requirement to report to the State and criminal authorities the fact that an offence against a child had taken place. The same legislative provision had existed in respect of white-collar offences for some time. That was the culture within which that suite of legislation was introduced.

Deputy Paul Donnelly correctly recalled the incident of the taxi driver more recently. He will also recall the systematic and predatory way in which abusers went from club to club, as we have seen over the last ten years. If we were having a different conversation, if an event had happened recently about a child abuse incident in any school, club or anything else, we would come here in a different way. We would preface our conversation by saying "I do not care how long the vetting process takes, you do it and that is all there is to it." We are saying the same thing. Sometimes it is just useful to flip the perspective to work out exactly how we would get it right. Although I would have liked it to be a little shorter, this review process is a good one. There is a good consultation. Let us look at the report that comes out and try to work out the tangible, practical way in which we can take this forward in a more efficient way, crucially with child protection absolutely at the centre, as the Deputy has said. It is not 12 years since that suite of legislation was enacted. We have an awful lot more work to continue to do but we are in a much better place than we were in 2010 and 2011 when this was so desperately needed. In this State, we are trying to continually improve our processes for everyone, and that is the spirit in which the Deputy has brought this legislation forward. We hope to be able to respond together in kind to improve it.

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