Ireland has a sex offenders register but we don't know where it is

IT has been impossible, these last few days, to watch the images broadcast from Soham without sharing the sense of desolation felt by the families involved.

And yet it is impossible to understand the awful depth of that desolation, the sense that lives have been wrecked beyond repair. The deaths of two little girls, and the manner of those deaths, is surely a tragedy almost beyond comprehension. And the pain of those who must carry on will frequently feel beyond endurance.

Often we associate tragedy with place names New York, Omagh, Enniskillen and Warrington are four names that will always come instantly to my mind. And without meaning to, we tend to rank tragedies in terms of the impact they have on us, usually generated by the size of the numbers involved.

But there is an intimacy, a closeness, about the murder of children that makes it impossible to shake the feeling of horror.

For that reason the name of the village in which Holly and Jessica lived their short lives, and met a terrible end, will always be remembered too.

Behind the grief we all feel for the families caught up in these terrible events, there is, I'm sure, a growing doubt about the strength and direction of the investigation conducted by the local police. It is possible that no-one could have done more, but if it turns out to be the case that the police have good, strong reasons for arresting the two suspects involved, then questions will surely be asked about why they weren't under suspicion earlier.

Judging from the reports one reads (and I know a lot of that has to be discounted) there has certainly been good reason to wonder about the behaviour and personality of one of the suspects for some time.

It's not our job as citizens, of course, to harbour suspicions about other people, and it would very quickly become a dangerous and unpleasant society to live in if people apart than police had any role in so analysing others.

But when a serious crime has been committed (or is in the process of being committed), more than usual vigilance is required.

Against the background of this tragedy, it is also pertinent to ask if we are as well-equipped as we should be in protecting our own children.

Nobody believes we can protect children against every possible eventuality. All parents know danger is part of the modern world. But are we in a position to prevent some of this horror? Do we have the structures, the expertise, the resources and the legislation to prevent crimes of this sort, and to investigate them effectively if they happen?

At first glance, it seems the legislation aimed at guarding children, especially from sex offenders, is tough. The main act is the Sex Offenders Act 2001, brought into effect by John O'Donoghue in September 2001.

Among the provisions of that act, intensively debated in the Dáil, are:

* a new notification procedure or tracking system for all convicted sex offenders. This requirement will also extend to any sex offenders entering this jurisdiction from abroad.

* a new Civil Sex Offenders Order enabling gardaí to seek a court order against sex offenders whose behaviour in the community gives the gardaí reasonable cause for concern.

* a new system of post-prison supervision for sex offenders.

* new requirements for sex offenders when seeking employment where unsupervised access to children is involved.

* substantial increases in penalties for sexual assault.

As I said, all of that has been put into the law in the last couple of years. Other changes have happened too. There has been a significant rise in prosecutions of sex offenders.

The old system in Ireland, where being a member of certain professions or of the Church was too often a badge of protection against prosecution, is gone. We have passed laws establishing an Ombudsman for Children (which ought to improve the status of children in general); widened the offences and increased the penalties involved in child trafficking and pornography; sought to protect children from abduction and enshrined interests of children in certain legal situations.

In other words, it would appear Ireland has been very swift to act in protecting our children from an increasingly nasty and dangerous world.

Whatever reservations there might have been about the civil rights issues involved in the establishment of a register of sex offenders, a consensus has emerged that such a register is necessary.

As a result, it has been put into law and people who prey on children should take no comfort from the Irish Statute Book.

But what is the situation on the ground? Is there actually a register? Who keeps it? How up to date is it? How is it disseminated? How quickly can it be of use in an investigation if it is ever needed? When the Bill was coming into force, Minister O'Donoghue said that the Garda, the Probation and Welfare Service, the Courts and the Prisons had all put procedures in place to "facilitate the registration of all those convicted of sex offences or currently serving a sentence for a sex offence".

What are those procedures? How well are they working? Who is in charge? To whom do they account?

I don't want to know who is on the register, and I don't want to see these people's names and pictures splashed all over some tabloid newspaper.

I do want to know, however, that someone in authority can answer all the questions posed above.

I've tried to find the answers to these questions myself, but without success.

What I would like to have demonstrated is that, after the passage of the law, the relevant authorities did actually come together to establish a sound data base, not of some convicted offenders, but of all of them.

I would love to have proved that they dedicated resources and personnel to the job. That there is a "tracking unit" constantly ensuring that the data base is monitored and accurate. That people are being trained on a constant basis in the use of it for investigative and profiling or comparison purposes.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if any of this were actually going on, we'd know more about it than we do. We do know that there is no public record of gardaí ever seeking a court order under the act. We know that there have been several instances of convicted sex offenders slipping through the net that should prevent them having uncontrolled access to young people. For example, one of them secured a taxi plate.

In other words and this is the hard question did we put the relevant legislation through the Dáil, clap ourselves on the back, and then slip back into inertia?

Are we really equipped to protect our children from another Soham by identifying predators before they do their evil deeds? Or do we just tell ourselves we are?