The proposal of the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, to set up a register of sex offenders to prevent Ireland becoming a safe haven for foreign paedophiles has been given a qualified welcome by a criminal psychologist.
According to Prof Maxwell Taylor of the department of applied psychology at UCC, the register needs to be considered as part of an overall strategy.
"I think it's a positive thing to happen but we need to be clear as to why it's being introduced and what we expect to achieve by introducing it," Prof Taylor said in an interview on RTE Radio Cork at the weekend.
Prof Taylor expressed concern that a register may be a knee-jerk political reaction to public demand.
"If it is to be effective, it needs to be placed in some broader strategy of the management of offenders. I think one of the grave dangers of an initiative of this kind is that we imagine by introducing a register that we've solved the problem.
"All the evidence suggests that registers don't solve the problem of sexual offenders. I suspect that, in the main, they've been introduced as a political response to some perceived need rather than a thought-through response to managing offenders," he said.
According to Prof Taylor, registers work well when there is a clear sanction for failure to register and when the list is properly maintained but he warned that the process of inclusion on the list should be carefully thought out.
"It may be the threat of entering somebody's name on the register is a deterrent but there's no evidence that it prevents offending," Prof Taylor said. He had reservations about allowing i notify the Garda notify communities of an offender in their area.
"As a scientist, you have to question what value that would be in terms of changing offending and I'm not sure it would serve any purpose in that respect other than generate a lot of fear and anxiety in a community.
"To avoid that, you need to return to the experience in America which is that releasing names to the public also has to be associated with a lot of community education about the nature of the threat that the community faces.
"It seems to me to be likely that when an individual is named on a register, you are, in a sense, branding them for life and, in a sense, you are saying, that's something that will always live with them and you're also branding their family."
Putting a name on a register would deal only with those who had offended and would not eliminate the problem, he said.