"YES, of course it could happen here," the ISPCC chief executive, Mr Cian O Tighearnaigh, said yesterday as news of the Belgian child murders dominated the first morning of the international child abuse conference.
A register of abusers and a register of children at risk would help prevent such tragedies, he said. "The minimum you require would be an at risk register. Abusers tend to gravitate towards vulnerable children and vulnerable families.
The Irish system of remission for sex offenders should include a supervisory order. "You've got somebody like Brendan Smyth. Unless he faces charges from the DPP here he could be walking out of Magilligan Prison in the very near future."
This should not mean "locking people up and throwing away the key", Mr O Tighearnaigh said "but if we're putting people back into society there should be some kind of therapeutic relationship. All of the research is telling us that somebody who has got the taste for sex abuse won't stop".
The ISPCC would be giving more than 30 papers and presentations during the conference, he said. "It's an opportunity for Ireland to learn what good child protection looks like."
The question of mandatory reporting will be debated today. Mr O Tighearnaigh said that this would be "one foolproof way of breaking the silence around child abuse. It's the point at which the talking has to stop and action has to start".
However, the editor of the Irish Social Worker, Mr Kieran McGrath, said that a child abuser register could be a recipe for inaction. "It's often seen by politicians as some kind of quick fix solution. I've worked in the [United] States and I've seen how they work, but there's no indication that they would make a huge difference, especially in the Belgian case. They were already known. They were visited."
Instead, Mr McGrath, who works with sex offenders, said that treatment for such people would be a more effective solution.
"However, that's not going to appeal to politicians, who want to be seen to be doing something."
. A Fine Gael MEP, Ms Mary Banotti, last night called for the urgent establishment of an EU wide database listing all missing children and all convicted paedophiles. "Official figures show there are 357,000 children missing in the US," she said. "But, in the absence of this database, we have no idea how many are missing in Europe."
Last year, Ms Banotti was appointed by the president of the European Parliament as his "mediator on transnationally abducted children".
When children went missing, if action was not taken within 24 hours "the trail goes cold". There was a need for an immediate follow up which would put the names of missing children on computer within hours.
Ms Banotti said that Europol should be the authorised agency for dealing with all missing children and people. "Interpol, clearly, is not doing the job," she added.