There is nothing more important than the protection and safety of our children.
The State should do everything in its power to ensure nothing happens to them.
Yet in Ireland a convicted sex offender could be living next door to us and we wouldn’t have a clue.
This is because our sex register – if you would call it that – the so-called list of convicted sex offenders, is a joke.
In America I can log on to the register and find out the address of every pervert living around me.
It makes it easier to keep children safe and away from paedophiles.
A similar rule – Sarah’s Law – applies in Britain. But our country has a different view. The public is not entitled to know where our sex pests live.
It believes they deserve a second chance and feels their lives would be in danger from the general public if we knew where they lived.
Yet there is absolutely no evidence to prove this theory and it is nothing but narrow-minded liberal nonsense.
There isn’t really a specific Irish sex register.
Instead a Garda Inspector in each division has a list and has to monitor each pervert who lives there.
They don’t have the resources to keep up to date with what they are at.
When a pervert has done his time he is freed and has to give an address where he will live. So he can write to the cops in Drogheda and say he is going to live in Killarney.
But he only has to stay at that residence in Kerry one day a week.
The rest of the time he can go where he wants.
The gardai in Kerry wouldn’t even know what he looks like never mind who be mixes with.
And you would not have a clue if he lived next door.
One prominent backbench TD, Denis Naughten from Roscommon, is trying to sort the whole mess since successive Governments have ignored it for years.
He has a Private Member’s Bill before the Dail waiting for this new Government to support it.
New Justice Minister Helen McEntee, a future Taoiseach in my view, has indicated she will back it.
Naughten’s law doesn’t go as far as I would like and publish the addresses of all sex offenders.
However, if you are suspicious about someone and they are acting strangely around children, it allows you, a club or organisation to go to the gardai, who would have to tell you if that individual is a convicted pervert.
This is a major step forward in dealing with a problem which has been ignored for years.
The quicker it becomes law the better.
