Alan Shatter (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The relevant organisations are referenced in section 2, I believe. I do not want to delay the House by reading through them. Schedule 1 also details a range of things. Legislation in this area has been promised for years - I do not say this to score a political point. Legislation in this area is complex and has been promised since 2003. When I was a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Constitutional Amendment on Children, we published a report, I believe, in September 2008 urging the then Minister of State with responsibility for children to publish this legislation by Christmas 2008. For a number of years the previous Government delayed it on the grounds that there was a constitutional impediment to dealing with this. The previous Government went through all sorts of gyrations on that issue. When it was first examined by the committee it was decided there was not a constitutional difficulty and the late, Brian Lenihan finally accepted that. Rather than publishing legislation by December 2008, as the committee urged, no legislation was published and there has been no protection for children in these areas as envisaged by this Bill in the context of soft information, in particular. Of course the vetting bureau is doing much good work with hard information, but not with soft information. We are now at the end of 2012 and certainly four years on from when the Oireachtas committee examined the matter, I regard it as urgent that we enact this legislation.

The legislation recognises a dividing line, which is that individuals and families are entitled to make certain private arrangements relating to child minding without them being criminalised if they do not engage in vetting - it is not appropriate to criminalise people. Where agencies are recruiting individuals, who might be professional child-minders or professional au pairs, it is appropriate that those individuals provided to a family through such a business agency be vetted, particularly when this is a business co-ordinating a broad range of people.

Let us consider the practicality of this. There are all sorts of circumstances relating to children. I fully accept the amendment is well intended - I do not want to be misunderstood in that regard. However, I need to consider the wording of the amendment and not its intention. If a mother and father, married or unmarried, wanted to go out for an evening asked the neighbour's 17 or 18 year old, who gets on very well with their child, to mind their five or six year old child and they are going to pay the person for that, the Senator's amendment would criminalise the parents for not having the neighbour's child vetted - we cannot do that. People often make family arrangements in all sorts of circumstances at the last minute.

Let us deal with the au-pair issues. There are two or three different ways to get an au pair. A family might deal through an agency operating in Dublin, in which case the au pair will be vetted. The vetting of au-pairs can have limited usefulness in any case. I know a number of families with young children who in recent years had au pairs. Some of the au pairs were young women in their early 20s who had come from Poland. Some of them were in third level education in Ireland. They were staying with the family and in return for the food and roof over their heads, and they acted as an au pair sometime during the day or the evenings looking after the children. The Garda bureau cannot undertake any vetting that is relevant for a young woman who has arrived from Poland, Italy or Spain to check the position.

Parents take responsibility and there is a responsibility on parents in some areas when they make private arrangements. We are ensuring that people who work with children for clubs or other organisations either voluntarily or for payment are vetted. We are ensuring that people in the education and health sectors are also vetted. There is a broad range of circumstances for vetting. However, we live in an imperfect world and cannot legislate for everything. The dividing line determined in the Bill is that where families make a private arrangement with an individual - not through an agency - they are entitled to some family autonomy. It is almost impossible to address this in legislation in a way that would not create a real problem for practical arrangements that are made every day by families and which give rise to no problem.

We all know of child abuse and institutional abuse in the churches and elsewhere that has received so much publicity. From all the work I have done over many years in family law on child protection issues, I am very aware that more children are abused in the home, by relations or by neighbours than have been abused by members of the clergy or by strangers. Based on the research evidence, this State is no different from others. There have been incidents of abuse and prosecutions of individuals involved in child minding. However, the overwhelming majority of abuse has not been by people recruited to mind children. It is much more likely to be the uncle, the grandfather or father. In a smaller number of cases it has been the mother of the child. It could be the father of the child, who lives next door, who has never babysat. We live in a very imperfect world where we cannot legislate for everything. Sadly we cannot legislate to wipe away the fact that children are at risk in certain circumstances. We must recognise a degree of family autonomy and that families are entitled to make private arrangements.

This legislation is new and provides for the use of soft information. While the legislation is quite complex, it is built on the practical experience of how the vetting bureau operates. This is a step we cannot take. I want to ensure we have the best legislation we can have within the constitutional constraints, under which we operate. Of course we have thought about this issue to see if there is a practical way to deal with it. The dividing came down to where families make private arrangements with an individual. whether it is a private arrangement with someone up the road who will come in and clean the house for a couple of hours two or three days a week because the husband or wife is unable to do it or they are both working and there happen to be children in the home, whether someone is formally coming in to child-mind or whether it is someone coming on the occasional evening five or six times a year, there are areas into which we cannot enter.

These are areas of privacy for families. Families make their judgments. Many families in this area make good judgments. They do not need vetting.

Then there is the other obvious issue, which is the capacity of the vetting bureau to process all of this. If one looks at the myriad of private arrangements that individuals make some of which have a semi-commercial tint, if someone is looking after one's child one will often pay them for doing so. If someone is coming in to clean one's house one will pay them something to do that and they may come in contact with one's children. There is a limit to the capacity of the vetting bureau to engage in vetting. There will be a considerable amount of important additional work derived from the use of soft information and the provisions of the Bill, and it is important that this is up and running.

I will make one point to Members which applies to every piece of legislation. There is no monopoly of wisdom with regard to any piece of legislation that comes before this House no matter how well it has been teased out. We all are constantly engaged in legislating either because we are revisiting areas that have been previously addressed where flaws have been disclosed or there is a new area in respect of which legislation is required that has not previously been addressed. This is an area in a sense that has not been previously properly addressed in the State by way of legislation. If it emerges, through experience, that there is some frailty in the legislation, if it turns out, in its operation and application, that some amendments are needed, for as long as I am Minister I can say to this House I will not be slow to introduce amending legislation that could be required as a consequence of the experience in working with what we have. However, what we have is very important. It is important we get it enacted before the end of this year, we get it up and running, and that another year does not pass before the substantial additional protections afforded by this legislation to children are in operation.