Ireland and Britain to track sex offenders

A NEW agreement between Britain and Ireland will make it easier to track and monitor sex offenders.

The Irish and British Governments are due to sign an information-sharing agreement on the movement of sex offenders in the coming months.

Rape crisis centres have welcomed the move, but pointed out that Ireland had poorer supervisory structures than Britain.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said: “A Memorandum of Understanding on information sharing arrangements between Ireland and the UK, including Northern Ireland, relating to sex offenders has been negotiated by the department and the Home Office.

“The MoU relates to information about persons travelling between this jurisdiction and the UK and who are subject to sex offender notification requirements in their own jurisdiction.”

The spokesman said: “Its purpose is that such information is shared for the purposes of the protection of the public from the risks presented by sex offenders.”

He said the Minister of Justice, Michael McDowell, had recently received Government approval for its signature.

The Rape Crisis Network of Ireland (RCNI) said the memorandum was an important step forward.

“We absolutely welcome it. The UK have a much more sophisticated way of monitoring and supervising the movement of sex offenders and people who are known to be a danger to children and others,” said RCNI’s Clíona Saidlear.

“However, what again gets thrown up here is that we’ll have a situation in Ireland where we’ll have a gathering of soft information on sex offenders from outside Ireland but don’t have it on sex offenders within Ireland.”

She said the British system includes hard information, of people convicted of sex offences, and soft information, of people suspected of posing a risk to children.

Soft information includes details of charges of child abuse against a person which did not go ahead, or previous employment history raising serious concerns about a person.

“We have what has erroneously been called a Sex Offenders Register. It’s not actually a register and probation officers can’t actually enforce registration.

“We can only vet for people who have convictions, and we know how few people have convictions. We’ve the worst record in western Europe,” added Ms Saidlear.

The Justice Department spokesman said a recently formed Registered Sex Offender Advisory Group was evaluating the potential for sharing information and examining registration criteria in both jurisdictions.