Gardaí must be allowed to disclose all relevant details on childcare staff

THE Garda Vetting Unit in Thurles is a small, discreet office.

Housed in a modern business park, it is tucked away somewhat from the hustle and bustle of the town. Looking at it from the outside, you’d never guess that a key battle is waged in there, day in and day out. But the people who work in that office are engaged in a critical, fundamental activity. Most of them are civilians, although they are led by a dedicated garda inspector, Pat Burke, and a small team of able garda sergeants.

Their mission is a simple one — child protection. And it’s a mission they take seriously. It is their job to seek to ensure that no one works with children who shouldn’t be working with children, and they work very hard and exercise careful judgment to see that that happens. They are hampered by the fact that vetting isn’t yet compulsory everywhere it should be, no matter what the official position states.

And they are hampered by a lack of resources. It is that lack of resources, and the weakness in the law that would lead most objective observers to the conclusion that we still don’t take the task of vetting seriously enough.

The unit holds more than one million records on paper, all carefully filed to be quickly accessible. They are the records of every conviction for a crime handed down by a court in Ireland, and they are there to be checked against anything their computers throw up. However, the key weapon at their disposal is the garda PULSE system.

PULSE is an acronym for Police Using Leading Systems Effectively. It sounds a bit clumsy, spelt out like that, but it enables gardaí all over the country to have instant access to critical information. Every conviction is also recorded on PULSE, as are the details of a great many Garda investigations and intelligence-gathering operations. The system enables key staff in the vetting unit to find out quickly whether any applicant for vetting has a criminal past. And they apply experience, judgment and a wide range of contacts to try to ensure that where there is good reason to be suspicious, the protection of children from risk will be the core concern.

Essentially the way it works is this. If you want to work with children (or with vulnerable elderly people), either as a volunteer or as a member of staff, the organisation employing you should submit an application for vetting to the unit. That application will contain some personal information about you — your name and some recent addresses, for instance. In filling up the application, you will be asked to sign a declaration that there are no convictions on your record that you should have told your employer about.

The information you supply will then be checked against the information held by the gardaí, and your employer will be told the outcome. If you haven’t told the truth about your past, that will become clear almost immediately. And astonishingly, the vetting unit has come across cases where people have solemnly declared they have no previous convictions, but the checking has thrown up some of the most serious crimes possible.

But here’s the thing. I said at the start that the unit has only one interest — child protection. It is not interested in destroying a person’s character or chances of a livelihood, and it has no interest in embarrassing people unnecessarily. If you had, say, a public order offence, or a conviction for petty theft, on your record from when you were a lot younger, that’s not necessarily going to rule you out of a job. What may rule you out, of course, is being caught telling a lie on the application form. It’s worth knowing that if you are going to be vetted, it pays to tell the truth.

And it can be both scary and encouraging to submit yourself to vetting. In my own position in Barnardos, I’ve been through a pretty thorough procedure that involved submitting every address I’ve lived at since I was 16. That’s a lot of addresses, and when you see your life written down like that, you can’t help thinking you’re about to be found out! On the other hand, when the clearance form comes back all right, it can be pretty reassuring.

Most people, I believe, accept the need for vetting. The basic flaws in the system, however, mean that the service is still only available in far too limited a way. A statement the other day from the Minister for Children, Brendan Smith, expressed the strong commitment of the Government to child protection.

But it also confirmed that Garda vetting only applies to new recruits, and not to existing staff, in primary and post-primary education, certain third-level education institutes, youth work organisations, selected sports organisations and care homes for the elderly. And it confirmed that vetting of all staff in the childcare sector will only commence from September 2007 — that’s a further three months away.

The vetting unit is capable of working flat out, on a shift basis if necessary — it’s set up that way. According to the Minister for Children, there are plans to increase its staffing and capacity. But that’s not the first time such an announcement has been made by Government ministers, and the extra staff haven’t been sanctioned yet.

The other basic flaw concerns not just the legal underpinning of the requirement for vetting, but also the type of information that can be used to sound strong warnings. At present, the only information that can be transmitted to a prospective employer is previous convictions.

BUT that may not be the only information in the possession of the system.

It could happen here, as it happened in Britain, that someone could have been arrested several times in the past on well-founded suspicion of criminal activity in connection with children. Those arrests and subsequent investigation could have stopped short of a conviction for any one of half a dozen reasons. As things stand, the fact of the arrests, and any intelligence gathered on the suspect, cannot be transmitted to an employer.

We had a scandal last week that has surprised and shocked a great many people. Imagine the scandal and outrage there would be if someone committed a crime against children while in the employment of a child protection agency, and then it was revealed that the gardaí had good reason to be suspicious of the person and had kept it to themselves?

Yet that is the risk we are running — not because of any desire on the part of the gardaí, far from it. We have to change the law and, if necessary, the constitution, to enable the gardaí to collect all key information relevant to the protection of children. We can define that properly to ensure nobody is empowered to collect tittle-tattle and use that against individuals, and we can build further protections into the system to prevent unfair damage to any individual’s reputation. But we have a great child protection vehicle in place in the vetting unit. We have to give them the tools to do the job properly.