Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

The Long Title of the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act states: "AN ACT TO PROHIBIT TRAFFICKING IN, OR THE USE OF, CHILDREN FOR THE PURPOSES OF THEIR SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND THE PRODUCTION, DISSEMINATION, HANDLING OR POSSESSION OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, AND TO PROVIDE FOR RELATED MATTERS." The overall purpose of the Act, as stated in the Long Title, must be considered when one examines the detail. It is to protect children from sexual exploitation. For a child to see a bull covering a cow or a stallion covering a mare does not constitute sexual exploitation. The Director of Public Prosecutions would not get away with that and no reasonable court would interpret the law in that way. We are dealing with a dirty old man, having communicated with the child, who gets the child to come to his house and shows the child blue movies or allows the child to see two friends engage in sexual intercourse on a bed. Sexual in this context would undoubtedly mean human sexual activity and not budgerigars mating in a cage or the like. That allowed, I do not know how one would criminalise a dirty old man who communicates with a child on a number of occasions on the Internet, gets that child to come to a place, for example, a hotel bedroom, and has the child witness a couple having intercourse or some act of sexual fetishism.

This is the difficulty of the grooming offence. One knows one wishes to criminalise that activity and that it is outrageous for a dirty old man to do that to a child. However, to say, as was put to me last night, that a babysitter who kissed his girlfriend in the presence of a child, having gone to the house to look after the child, would commit this offence is fanciful. I was thinking overnight about how to differentiate between the two scenarios I have outlined. There is nothing illegal about a couple having sex in a hotel bedroom and there is nothing theoretically illegal about a child seeing it. However, there is something very wrong about somebody arranging for that to happen. That is the problem we are dealing with.

I cannot decide not to go down that road because it is difficult. Fine Gael could have decided not to do anything about it in its Private Members' Bill since there is nothing wrong with it in principle, but there is something deeply wrong with it. I ask the House to take the view that a court looking at the legislation would see it as a Bill to prevent the sexual exploitation of children. It is not exploitative of a child to bring that child to a farmyard when a stallion is covering a mare; there is nothing exploitative about a child seeing a babysitter give his girlfriend a kiss. These are extreme examples which have no basis in reason or common sense. No court would entertain a case of that type and the Director of Public Prosecutions would not prosecute such a case. However, we must criminalise a dirty old man who, for the purpose of grooming a child, inveigles that child to go to a hotel room to witness a couple having intercourse.