Let’s have a single hi-tech database to track all convicted sex offenders

IT WOULD be reassuring, wouldn’t it, to be certain that convicted sex offenders were being monitored.

There are some parts of the world, especially the United States, where it is possible to track the whereabouts of an offender over the internet. That may not be a great idea, but it is essential, isn’t it, that if a convicted sex offender is living in Ireland, the gardaí know where he is.

Here’s what the gardaí themselves have to say on the matter: “As a result of the introduction of the Sex Offenders Act 2001, certain notification requirements are now imposed on a category of convicted sex offenders. The Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Investigation Unit has a central function in the operation of this legislation.”

That couple of sentences comes from the most recent report of An Garda Síochána. It’s the only reference I can find to the idea of a sex offenders’ register. The reason it’s so vaguely worded is because we don’t have, in the normal meaning of the term, any such thing as a sex offenders’ register.

So how do we monitor sex offenders in Ireland?

It’s a complicated procedure that goes something like this. When a person (most convicted sex offenders are men) is convicted of a sex offence, the court issues a certificate to him. That certificate sets out the nature of the offence and the sentence he has received. It also tells him he has become subject to a reporting requirement. The certificate is also given to the gardaí and to the prison governor where the sentence will be served.

The gardaí pass the certificate on to the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Unit, who keep all the certificates in one place. Once the offender has been released from prison, he is required to report to the gardaí for as long as the court has decided (the length of time generally relates to the severity of the crime, but is seldom less than five years).

The offenders are supposed to fill in a notification form and this should be cross-referenced with the collection of certificates.

Local gardaí are then supposed to make regular enquiries to ensure that the sex offenders in the local district are still residing at the address given in the notification form and that all the information contained in the notification form is accurate and up-to-date.

A nominated inspector in each garda division has responsibility for liaising with the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Unit to ensure that monitoring is happening. And we have to assume it is. What I find impossible to understand is why there isn’t a single electronic database where all this information is recorded.

There’s a set of court certificates, supposed to be married to a set of notification forms, and supplemented by regular reports from local gardaí. But as far as I can ascertain, it’s not combined into one single record.

The value of a full register would be immediately apparent if, for example, a convicted offender failed to comply with his notification requirements. The register could easily be programmed to set off an alarm rather than everyone making the assumption that the local gardaí were on top of the matter.

The holding of a register in one easy format would not represent an infringement of anyone’s rights. Only the gardaí would know the whereabouts and movements of sex offenders, but they would be in a position to keep a constant watch.

The issue is further complicated, of course, by the fact that sex offenders can come into Ireland from abroad. The sharing of information between the police forces of different jurisdictions is made even more difficult by the fact that systems are so different from place to place.

It’s not even clear that our gardaí have a proper legal basis on which to hold information on foreign sex offenders who have served their sentences abroad and have now chosen to live here.

The law in relation to sex offenders — the Sex Offenders Act of 2001 — seems to me to cover only people who have been convicted in an Irish court.

There is an exception, where a foreign sex offender must report to the gardaí if he is here for seven days, and if the crime of which he is committed is the same as a crime in our jurisdiction. I’m not sure if that’s enough.

The bottom line, surely, has to be that we can have absolute confidence that if there are sex offenders in the jurisdiction, they are never free to operate with impunity. There is no reason to doubt the commitment of the gardaí, but the system is incredibly complicated and there is no transparency to it.

How many certificates are kept? How well are they correlated to notification orders? Who is in charge? To whom do they account? Why is there no published data?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to know who is on the register, and I don’t support the viewpoint that would have people’s names and pictures splashed all over some tabloid newspaper. But it ought to be possible to know the numbers and to be reassured that the system is foolproof. As it is designed in law at the moment, this is far from clear. We do know, because it’s one area where there is a good deal of transparency, that the garda vetting system works very well. As I’ve written here before, they regard it as their duty to try to ensure that no one gets a job working with children who isn’t safe to do so, and they have been very successful in providing a high level of reassurance.

BUT garda vetting only works when people are applying for jobs. It’s still possible for someone to become, say, a volunteer coach to children in a tennis club, without any vetting taking place. And up to now, the Garda Vetting Office could only report convictions to a prospective employer.

Soon enough it appears, if Oireachtas recommendations are implemented, the law will be changed to put garda vetting on a statutory basis. That will, or ought to, mean that anyone working with children, in any capacity, will be vetted — vetting will be compulsory throughout the system. And the gardaí will be able to raise warning signals about not just people who have convictions, but where there are well-grounded suspicions that it could be unsafe to allow them to have access to children.

This is an overdue and welcome development. The value of a proper legal basis should also include provisions to ensure that nobody would be deprived of their good name as a result of gossip or malicious rumour. But the best legal system in the world won’t work if the structures and resources underpinning it are inadequate.

We’ve been working at this for a number of years now against the background of a number of scandals. Our system is complicated and unwieldy, and cannot provide all the assurance the community is entitled to. All the evidence suggests that people with a track record of attacking children remain dangerous even after they have completed their sentences. If we’re to protect children, we’ve got to get our systems right.