A register of sex offenders will be introduced by the Minister for Justice but a decision on whether all sex offenders or just convicted paedophiles should be included will not be made until late autumn.
The Department is receiving submissions on this and other issues concerning sex offenders and will accept submissions until the end of the month, a spokesman said.
He was responding after demands for action following the news that 35 sex offenders will be released from prisons in the next six months.
He could not say if any of the offenders had received treatment while in prison. But he did say that only 10 prisoners a year were treated in the intensive therapy project in Arbor Hill Prison.
The figure means that, statistically, no more than one or two of those to be released is likely to have been treated.
Sex offenders should be required to notify gardai of their whereabouts for the rest of their lives following their release, Mr Cian O Tighearnaigh of the ISPCC said yesterday.
They should also be obliged to co-operate with any treatment programmes available to them. They should be encouraged to admit to the communities in which they live that they have been convicted of child abuse.
Such an admission would reduce the likelihood of re offending and would make vigilante activity against them less likely, he said.
The Department of Justice spokesman said that in common with all offenders, sex offenders were given the opportunity for one-to-one counselling geared to the type of offences they had committed.
But he admitted that the only specialised, intensive treatment programme was the one in Arbor Hill which treated 10 people a year, some of them transferred from other prisons for the purpose.
The population of Arbor Hill alone is over 200, most of them sex offenders.
The spokesman said sex offenders were never given early release though they qualified for the normal remission.
This policy was criticised by Mr Kieran McGrath, one of the childcare professionals who started the country's first programme for teenage sex offenders on Dublin's northside, and who has worked on a treatment programme for sex offenders in the United States.
Treatment greatly reduced the chance of reoffending, he said. But many prisoners believed there was nothing in it for them and so refused to consider it.
By holding out the possibility of early release to those who successfully completed treatment programmes, more offenders could be persuaded to have treatment if this was available.
Men who had abused their own children or relatives were more likely than others to be motivated to undergo treatment, he said. Men who abused boys outside the family were likely to refuse treatment, and of those who accepted treatment, many failed to respond to it.
An international authority on reoffending last night told The Irish Times that for some sex offenders the probability of reoffending would be below 5 per cent - but that for others it would be higher than 50 per cent.
Those most likely to reoffend were men who had abused boys outside their own families, and who had a history of previous offences, Canadian researcher Dr Karl Hanson said.
In a recent study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Dr Hanson and his colleague, Dr Monique Bussiere, found that of more than 23,000 sex offenders who had completed treatment programmes, just over 13 per cent were known to have reoffended after four or five years in the community.
Mr McGrath said there had been an increase in the number of treatment programmes for sex offenders around the State.
Existing programmes in the Central Mental Hospital, Arbor Hill, Donegal and the Northside Inter-agency Project in Dublin have been augmented by new programmes in the North-Eastern and Western Health Board areas and at Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children, Crumlin. A programme was also being started in the South Eastern Health Board area, he said.