In all the fuss over the X case offender getting a taxi licence, little has been said about vetting in other areas. As Kathy Sheridan discovered, checking volunteers against Garda information is not as easy as it should be
The photograph is a PR's dream: the Taoiseach sharing a big smile with a Special Olympics participant and telling us that he wants to be a Special Olympics volunteer. And because Special Olympics athletes are a vulnerable group, he will even undergo Garda screening. In fact, we learn, all 30,000 Special Olympics volunteers will be screened.
Across the land, the heads of voluntary organisations gaped and wondered. Are some vulnerable groups more worthy of protection than others? Terry Dignan is still wondering. At the Barretstown Gang project every year he has to attract and manage some 450 volunteers to sustain the project for 1,500 seriously ill children from 18 countries.
And having attracted those volunteers, the first thing he does is get Garda clearance on them - because Barretstown children deserve as much protection as Special Olympics people, right?
Right? Wrong.
Barretstown is a voluntary organisation, so it is not entitled to seek Garda clearance on volunteers. You want vetting on volunteers from Uzbekistan, the US, Europe? Police there can make a background check in hours. You want Garda clearance on a volunteer from Naas? Forget it.
"The Garda won't screen anyone for us, not now, not ever. That's the case even though we rely on volunteers; we can have up to 100 of them at one gala alone," says Veronica Byrne, administrator of Swim Ireland, the 11,000- strong organisation once known, infamously, as the IASA. "In 1998, the year of our troubles, at a meeting addressed by Jim McDaid, a garda told us that they couldn't vet volunteers for any of us due to a lack of manpower." And so it remains.
With swimmings's "troubles" (ie, Derry O'Rourke, George Gibney) almost a by-word for child abuse for a while, a colleague who has spent 15 years "keeping vigil beside gloomy swimming pools" is not unusual.
Though many voluntary organisations responded with rigorous pre- and post-employment practices involving multiple references and codes of ethics, nothing will assuage the niggling fear that there may be information languishing in some police file ... So they resort to subterfuge.
One, whose handful of full-time staff is entitled to vetting but not its several hundred volunteers, simply "forgets" to mention that the vetting applicant is unpaid. Another solution (though unsatisfactory, as "suspicions" are not included in the data bank) is for applicants to apply for Garda clearance under the Data Protection Act, and pass that to the organisation. Not least are the informal arrangements with individual gardaí at local level and HQ, but which die as officers move on.
The latter scenario turned Terry Dignan's problem into a crisis a few weeks ago. The clearance service, he was told, was no longer available to him. Applicants under the Data Protection Act have also been rebuffed.
A letter from the Garda's Central Vetting Unit (CVU) in early February, states: "An Garda Síochána only process requests for Garda clearance for full-time prospective healthcare employees who have substantial access to children or vulnerable adults.
"This includes nurses, doctors and hospital staff directly employed by hospitals and homes under auspices of the health board. With whom we deal directly. Please send your application to the Human Resources Department Barretstown Gang Camp. Who will forward to us. Your €6.35 is herewith returned, there is no charge for this service."
An Irish Times request for an interview with the head of this new CVU, submitted several weeks ago, has met with no response.
So we do not know what constitutes "substantial access" to children. Nor how the unit justifies its hierarchy of deserving cases. Nor why it implies that an application from an organisation rather than an individual would be more fruitful, when it knows that both are a waste of time. Nor why there is suddenly "no charge" when a £5 request fee was routinely charged to applicants up to now.
Nor do we know, why, within days of the Minister for Justice triumphantly announcing the establishment of a Central Vetting Unit to "provide the basis for the development of an enhanced employee clearance system", even the emergency, informal co-operation available to Barretstown was withdrawn. In fact, had Nora Owen not asked the Dáil question that evoked that answer in the first place on January 30th, the CVU's very birth - on January 2nd, according to the Minister - would be a secret.
Its existence surprised many, not least the Garda Press Office, which went off to check and returned with the information that it was "more of a restructuring", with some additional staff. "I never heard anything about a CVU," says Terry Dignan. "Does it even exist?"
Well, the letterhead says it does.
It is frustrating but not surprising. Correspondence over several years between the Department of Justice, the Garda and various organisations points to a grievously drawn-out, inconsistent approach. It is also clear that the pressure for tighter controls has come entirely from the voluntary sector, rather than Government.
We may have to learn the hard way, as Northern Ireland did. The case of Martin Huston, a known sex offender, who was convicted in 1992 of 25 charges of sexual offences against six young boys, electrified the public.
Though under suspicion for years, he managed to insinuate himself into two voluntary organisations and up to the time of his second arrest and conviction in 1991, was still entrusted with the training and supervision of teenagers, with devastating consequences.
That happened despite the existence in the North of a criminal clearance service and a Pre-Employment Consultancy Service (PECS) - a register of workers who have been dismissed, transferred or who left ahead of the posse. The latter, though relatively toothless up to now due to its non-statutory status, is crucial, says Colin Reid of the Belfast-based NCPCC, given that "an estimated 95 per cent of child abusers are never convicted, for various reasons".
Owen Keenan of Barnardos in Dublin agrees, while acknowledging that the "tragic downside" of a PECS register is that allegations once made, can be almost impossible to disprove. "There are civil liberties issues involved, but these have to be weighed against the rights of children."
As people like Keenan and Dignan beg for official understanding, the push for tighter controls elsewhere is being driven firmly from the top.
Mary Banotti MEP, who raised this issue, notes that in recognition of the increasing movement of people across the EU, the European Commission has sanctioned research into the vetting arrangements of each EU State.
In the UK, a one-stop shop for prospective employers and voluntary organisations is being introduced. Laws enacted in Scotland and the North will ensure that checks - including non-conviction information - are made in all three jurisdictions.
In the North, draft proposals for a Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults Bill have been circulated. These make no distinction between paid workers and volunteers. They would also place PECS on a statutory basis, remedying the under-reporting by organisations fearful of litigation, by making individuals aware of their referral and giving them a right of appeal.
But with a beady eye on its nearest neighbour, the proposers seek views on a "difficulty in relation to those with addresses here [in the North] and who work in the South and vice versa". Should childcare organisations in the South, it asks, be able to make referrals and have checks carried out in the North? That would be handy for us, of course. But there could be no quid pro quo.
Northern organisations have serious concerns; there are Northerners they describe as "unsafe" already living south of the border. "And there are people from the South in the North, onwhom there is no way of getting a background check," says Owen Keenan. "If someone feels that the net is closing in on them, they're going to disappear. The tighter the controls become in the North, the more are going to come South. If there is one area for North-South collaboration, none is more urgent that this."
"We haven't even implemented the sex offenders' register yet," says Terry Dignan, "and when offenders do arrive here, they are given 10 days to register. A paedophile needs only minutes to do a lot of damage."
Terry Dignan is resigned: "I'm not going to take people on if I can't police check them. All I can do is reduce the number of families coming here and the programmes."
The question is, who decided that the smile of a seriously ill child is less precious than that of a Special Olympics athlete?