Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Thursday, 11 Jul 2024

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Ar dtús, ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil leis an bhfoireann in the Office of Parliamentary Legal Advisers, OPLA. The work of this office is crucial to ensure that Private Members' Bills are produced and it offers us an important resource. Obviously, Government has an advantage when it comes to policy and legislative reform, given the resources available to it. The OPLA plays an important role. The complexities of the issues involved in drafting this Bill, the research and the skilled handling of same in the preparatory stages by the OPLA, demonstrates the team's expertise and I commend their work.

Everybody accepts the need for vetting and the Garda vetting system as a whole represents a crucial measure which protects children and vulnerable adults. Garda vetting is used in many contexts, for both paid and voluntary roles in which applicants are dealing with children or vulnerable adults. Individuals have nothing to fear from the process and it is an accepted part of the recruitment process for many jobs involving vulnerable people. However, for those who need to be vetted multiple times, for multiple roles, the process can be cumbersome. It has been described to me as draining, unnecessary and a disincentive to volunteers. We all know that since Covid, it has been more difficult to get volunteers to work in clubs.

I have met people who have had to be Garda vetted for community games and then again in the same year for a rowing club or a GAA club, as well as for their employment. In some places of employment, if you move posts, you have to be vetted again. This Bill is an attempt to facilitate or make things a little easier for them. Recently, I spoke to a student who had just got a summer job at a camp. She has to be Garda vetted. There can be delays with housing applicants. Even though a person has already been Garda vetted, not once, twice or three times they must be Garda vetted yet again.

Only on Monday I was speaking to someone about the Bill and how I hope it will simplify the vetting process for workers and volunteers. He described it to me much better than I could have myself by saying that it seems to create a safe pass to somebody for three years. It would be for applicants within relevant organisations. It allows for this safe pass to be revoked where a criminal conviction occurs. Obviously this Bill does not refer to it as a safe pass but as a register of generalised consents, which I hope will be more effective than the status quo for those who need to be vetted multiple times.

Section 2 amends the National Vetting Bureau (Children and Vulnerable Persons) Act 2012 by defining the register.

Section 3 amends section 6 of the same Act to include the register of general consents as a register that is required to be included in the Garda National Vetting Bureau database system.

Section 4 requires the chief bureau officer to establish and then maintain a register of general consents in relation to each person who consents to the disclosure of information for the purpose of any application or any vetting disclosure. A person who gives this general consent will remain on this register for a period of three years. This section further requires the bureau to review regularly the register and update any information contained on the register. If, during the course of time, the bureau becomes aware in any review that a person has a criminal record or considers that there is specified information in relation to that person, the bureau must remove that person from the register. For those purposes, someone who has given a general consent must notify the bureau of certain changes of circumstance, such as if a name or address has changed. Section 7 creates a penalty for anyone who fails to notify the bureau of any material change.

Section 5 provides for a procedure for making an application for a vetting disclosure on a person who is entered on the register. Under this procedure it will no longer be necessary for the person in respect of whom the application is made to consent to the vetting procedure concerned or to provide all the information that is already contained on this register.

Section 6 provides that where a person has given consent to a vetting disclosure the person may at any time prior to the making of a vetting disclosure give a general consent to the disclosure of this information by the bureau to a liaison person who is a person appointed by a club, organisation or workplace for the purposes of any other application for a vetting disclosure. Therefore the information is there and that person, when the consent has been given during the course of the three years, can go and get that information without the formality and the bureaucracy of having to make another application, particularly in the same calendar year. The person’s information will be included in the register of general consents. The person will be deemed for the three years to have consent to any application for a vetting disclosure and disclose of information on foot of such an application. The person will not, however, be registered if the vetting disclosure concerned discloses a criminal record or if the bureau considers that there is specified information relating to that person or if the person is under 18 years.

In the research around this Bill, I saw that a number of other TDs had inquired over recent years about the creation of a one-off solution for vetting. I believe there is significant appetite there for a change like this or similar to it. I hope that if the Government does not implement this Bill itself that it would use the proposals to simplify the procedure to facilitate volunteers and workers and to enhance and embellish the lives of children and vulnerable adults by keeping them safe.

I thank Deputy Daly and Deputies Cronin and Donnelly for introducing this Private Members' Bill on Second Stage today and acknowledge their intentions in bringing forward the Bill.

I would also like to acknowledge, as Deputy Daly has, the work of the OPLA, which does extraordinary work to support Deputies in this House in producing Private Members' Bills. In my first role in this House, I was legal adviser in Fine Gael and my responsibility was to draft Private Members' Bills among other things and I drafted some spectacularly bad ones. It is very important that Members of the Oireachtas have dedicated, experienced drafters. Nevertheless, I always found when we were producing Private Members' Bills then, the Government response was almost always that it could not proceed because it was badly drafted. It was not a good way of dealing with legislation. That the OPLA is now there and can provide real support, is a much better way.

Notwithstanding that, something I have learned over the years is that the complexity of the drafting process with the OPC and the complexity of the policy formation process and how those things interact is equally difficult and important. For instance, I think the purpose of what this legislation seeks to do is excellent. When this process of reviewing the vetting process began in 2021, like other Deputies, I was in touch with all my sports clubs to ask how it should be improved, what were the practical issues and how we could make it better. There is a report which will be published at the end of the month about that. It has taken some time. There was some complexity with Covid and getting the different elements together but there is no question about the will of this House and its Members who work so closely with their local communities to make sure that this process is improved for the benefit of everybody in their community and particularly for the protection of children, first and foremost, but also for the administrative ease of the sports clubs and the people who are giving voluntarily of their time to participate in training kids in sport. It is very important.

This Private Members’ Bill seeks to amend the National Vetting Bureau (Children and Vulnerable Persons) Act 2012 to streamline the system of Garda vetting in situations where multiple vetting applications are made. The stated aim of the Bill is to provide for a register of generalised consents, which is intended to alleviate the administrative burden of making multiple vetting applications. The Bill seeks to provide that multiple organisations could vet an individual whose consent is included in the register without the entire vetting process having to be completed every time. That makes a lot of sense. The aims of the Bill are in line with Government policy. For this reason, we will not oppose the Bill.

However, there are some issues which I will tease through I may. While the intention behind the Bill as proposed by the Deputies has merit, the vetting process is complex and there are issues with legal, policy and operational aspects of the Bill as drafted, which I will turn to.

Under the current system of vetting, the new employee or volunteer is responsible for supplying accurate and up-to-date information to his or her employer but applications for vetting are submitted by the employer or voluntary organisation, rather than the person him or herself. The Garda National Vetting Bureau consults all of the relevant records available to the bureau to produce a vetting disclosure and this is used by the organisation to inform their different decisions. The vetting process also enables organisations to comply with legal obligations where sensitive work or vulnerable people are involved. The legislation stipulates that a relevant organisation shall not permit any person to undertake relevant work or activities on behalf of the organisation, unless the organisation has received a vetting disclosure from the bureau.

I agree that the current system of vetting can be burdensome in some circumstances. The need for complete and accurate information for the vetting process can cause frustration where a lot of detail needs to be submitted, particularly where people are involved in several voluntary groups or organisations at the same time or for short periods in quick succession. The interests of children and the issue of State liability requires that any known concerns regarding a prospective employee are assessed and addressed in a timely, rigorous and efficient manner. This ensures that organisations seeking vetting disclosures are notified where An Garda Síochána considers that disclosure of specific information is necessary, proportionate and reasonable for the protection of children. The safeguards provided by the legislation are very important and any changes must take place with proper consideration of all of the potential consequences. That is what we must think through.

The Deputy is aware that both the programme for Government and justice plan 2024 contain commitments to review the current vetting legislation and, as I said, that has begun. The Garda vetting review group will report in the coming month. The group is led by the Department of Justice and its purpose is to make recommendations to strengthen the vetting process. The group is considering approaches to vetting for specific employments.

It is assessing how to provide for the introduction of an effective system for revetting persons who were previously vetted. As part of the review process, consultations have happened with Sport Ireland, Charities Institute Ireland and the National Youth Council of Ireland, and feedback is ongoing. I understand they will be make their recommendations by the end of the month.

Returning to the Private Members' Bill and what has been suggested, it is important to acknowledge that the complexity of the vetting process is due to the vulnerability of children and adults. Our duty to provide for their safety is paramount. That means that the new proposals have to be considered with the utmost care. The difficulty with the Bill as drafted is that it does not account for differences in risk profiles between differing roles for which a person may need to be vetted. For example, a new role that involves intimate contact with children or vulnerable people, where a prior vetted role may have related to work under supervision, creates a risk of undermining the core purpose of the vetting process by not ensuring the vetting disclosure has been complied with, with a new role in mind which is different from the last role for which the person was vetted. It is, of course, as the Deputy will agree, vital to the safety and welfare of children and vulnerable people that an employer receives information which is both accurate and relevant at the time they make important staffing decisions. There is a complexity there which is one of the many that will have to be considered. When changes are made, I know the Deputy will be contributing to that as well but I just point out the particular difficulty in this Bill.

The central aim, however, of the Private Members' Bill is to reduce the administrative burden in vetting without diminishing the projecting involved. I totally understand that. In a very genuine way, it is to reduce the administrative burden involved in vetting particularly where people may need to be vetted by several organisations as can happen if somebody is good enough to be involved in volunteering or coaching in multiple sports clubs. By providing for a register of general consent, the Deputies believe it would remove the need for an employee to submit all their details for every vetting disclosure while their consent is active. That is fair enough. However, if it was enacted, as currently drafted, it appears that the provisions may actually increase the amount of work and effort involved both for the organisations seeking a vetting disclosure and for the National Vetting Bureau. The Private Members' Bill provides that a person would give their consent to vetting for a three-year period, during which they could potentially be vetted several times depending on what they were applying to do. However, the need for consent to be repeated is unfortunately the least onerous part of the application process. While the new employee or volunteer would no longer be required to submit all of their details to every organisation with which they are involved every time they are to be vetted for the period covered by their consent, that is unfortunately only the beginning of the vetting process.

The organisation applying for vetting would still need to obtain personal details so that the bureau could confirm if the subject has made a general consent and that it was within three years, and they would still need to check that the subject’s information recorded on the register is up to date. To add to this, the Bill will not change the process carried out by the National Vetting Bureau in arriving at a vetting disclosure. Each organisation would still be required to submit a separate application to the bureau and the bureau would still need to examine the records to make each vetting disclosure. Therefore, there would be a waiting period between when the employer submits an application and when a disclosure is received. In addition to this, the Private Members' Bill, as currently drafted, would impose a new obligation on the bureau to periodically check that the records are kept up to date for the three-year consent period, which would potentially require the bureau to divert resources from its core tasks to keeping a consent register up-to-date and sending out notices to people on the register. All of which may be where we have to go but this is just to tease out the particular practical difficulties at present.

Furthermore, the Attorney General's office has raised concerns in relation to criminalising those who fail to update their personal information. If that happens, they face a fine or a potential prison sentence of up to six months, which might not be proportionate relative to the volunteer trying to participate in children's sports in a reasonable way. As the Bill does not provide for a defence to this, it appears to be unduly punitive in circumstances where a person might forget to notify a change of address or a name change by marriage, within three months. There is a bit of work to do there.

The Attorney General has also advised that providing for revetting requires caution due to the potential impact upon a person’s constitutional rights to their good name and their livelihood, which is always the case when we are dealing with criminal offences. The protections provided in employment law differ between people who are being vetted for new roles and anyone who is being revetted. Those being vetted for the first time for a new role are protected from discrimination under the Employment Act, but the employer still has wide discretion on grounds of suitability. People who are being revetted for a job that they already hold are protected by the Unfair Dismissals Acts. That legislation provides existing employees with much greater protection than a prospective employee or volunteer. Any proposal for a system of revetting would need to be carefully drafted to ensure compliance with the law in that area and to ensure the provisions are robust enough to withstand legal challenges brought by people who may lose their jobs after an unfavourable revetting disclosure. An important issue here is what the employer can do with any unfavourable information they receive from a revetting disclosure. From the perspective of protecting a child or vulnerable person, the bureau must be in a position to ensure revetting disclosures are robust enough to support the employer in taking appropriate action. The bureau itself is not responsible for any decisions made by employers, but the system of vetting and the evidence basis for disclosures must be adequate to ensure children and vulnerable adults are protected. A further consideration to tease through is that a person should be vetted for future work that they might carry out in that employment, for example, on completion of probation or if they are promoted or redeployed.

What we do want to see is the way in which vetting within categories of employment or volunteering with similar risk profiles can be considered carefully. There is a bit of work to do there for us all. For example, if additional responsibilities involve a change in a person’s access to children or vulnerable people with an increased risk profile, they may need to be vetted again. We all want to see the system of vetting improved. This Private Members' Bill makes an important contribution to that in teasing out some of the practicalities of how that might be done. There has been a body investigating this for some time with detailed consultations with the different sports groups and we will see that report this month. As we approach that body of work, I suggest that when that report is produced, we look at it collectively with a shared objective of trying to improve this process; make it more administratively efficient; keep the underlying protection for children and vulnerable adults or vulnerable persons more broadly; make an efficient way of enabling people to gain, be promoted and changed within employment structures; and perhaps most notably of all, ensure we retain the fantastic volunteer ethos we have in Ireland and the contribution people make all over the country to different sports clubs among other activities.

Notwithstanding some of the issues I have teased out here, I want to reiterative my appreciation to the Deputies for seeking to address limitations, which we acknowledge exist within the current legislation, from a desire to improve the process.

I also wish to thank the OPLA for its work on this Bill. I am very glad to be co-proposing it with na Teachtaí Pa Daly agus Paul Donnelly and that we have this opportunity to address it further at this stage before the Dáil rises for the summer recess.

The purpose of our Bill is to keep the practice of vetting as effective and as safe as possible and to make the process as efficient as possible, both for community and the gardaí, and through them, wider society. With something as important as vetting, it is extremely important that it is not only thorough but also timely. We all have constituents who at one time or another have contacted us about delays and complications in the vetting process that are holding up either their employment or their ability to volunteer. I have had people contact me who have been delayed in a job and in trying to volunteer. Sometimes there might be an option to volunteer somewhere for a couple of months and it can take a couple of months to get the vetting done. As the Minister of State mentioned, we have a great ethos of volunteering in Ireland and people are anxious to do their bit for their communities. Given that, it is vital that all those who are working and those they are working with are safe and protected. It is also vital that people who are volunteering are facilitated in that process of vetting. I saw it myself in my volunteer group. I have been vetted twice. Once was when I was working with vulnerable adults and another time was when I was starting up the Maynooth community first responders, which I co-founded with other volunteers in my hometown of Maynooth. There is the energy that goes into that and there is the ethos we have of volunteering where people give up their time. I remember filling out the forms, which I had to do twice, and worrying about the addresses. After I had filled out the form the first time, I realised I had actually lived in Mynagh for the first year while my parents were waiting for their house. I was said to myself that the form would be different. You are terrified when sending something to the State and the Garda and that it must be correct. It is important because this is time-consuming for people who are vetted multiple times for the various roles.

You have to list every single address you lived at. I lived abroad for a few years and had to make sure I got those addresses right. I lived up in Drogheda, County Louth, where I worked when I was 19, and I had to try to remember the address I lived at there. It is burdensome and costly as well for the Garda to have to go through the process of checking out all your addresses.

The Bill proposes to establish a register of general consents whereby a person can apply to be added to that list, instead of having to apply multiple times. It would help keep the system at the security level necessary to protect all of society and make the process easier. Regarding the various issues the Minister of State raised in her address, that is why we do not just scribble down our thoughts on a piece a paper and bring it in here as a Bill. We go through all the various Stages. Those issues can be worked out in pre-legislative scrutiny or on Committee Stage.

I thank my colleagues for working on this Bill because it is an important one. We have been talking about this issue for a long time. I had a couple of previous roles. I worked for Tusla and I was also a children's officer in a GAA club, which was a challenging role in itself as it involved making sure everybody in the club was Garda vetted and children were protected. We had all of the policies and procedures in place to ensure children and young people were protected because the Garda vetting system is important. It is designed to protect children and vulnerable adults. It is used not only in a voluntary context but also for jobs and important roles in society involving work with young people, vulnerable people and older people. It is critical.

Vetting has been in the media in recent weeks due to the very serious case of a taxi driver, Raymond Shorten, who was convicted of two brutal rapes of women in his taxi. Subsequently, it emerged that this person had been convicted for another assault on a child several years ago. People are asking, quite rightly, about the Garda vetting process. I raised this matter last week. When you have children, you constantly talk about safety. When people use a taxi, they think everything is okay because drivers are vetted and we hope they will bring our children, family members and friends home safely. Unfortunately, that system needs to be looked at again to figure out how this happened. How was that person allowed to drive a taxi at that time? That is an important issue that needs to be looked at.

As I said, I was a children's officer, but I was also a coach in a GAA club. I remember one particular year when I had just been vetted again by Tusla. I had been vetted as a coach in the club. We then had a féile, which meant young people were staying in my home. We were Garda vetted for that in and around the same time. At that stage, I think I had been vetted about five times in about 18 months for different roles and voluntary groups I was involved in. I always thought "Here we go again". I am lucky in that I have not lived in many houses. I think I have only lived in three different places in my entire life. It was not difficult for me to find the addresses and remember where I had lived, but it is still an onerous task. I also thought about those five different times I sent a different form to the vetting bureau. There has to be a simpler, easier way of doing this.

With respect, the Minister of State raised important points about the Bill. The value of putting forward legislation is that someone else who casts a different eye on it will take a different view and will say we should try to make it a little better and do what we want and intend to do. In this case, it is to make it easier for people to get Garda vetting and provide for a speedier way of getting it done. Primarily, it is to ensure that every person who works with children, young people, older people and vulnerable people is vetted to the best degree possible. No system is foolproof and every system can be abused, but we need to do our best to ensure the system we have in place protects society.

Again, I thank my colleagues and the Minister of State for her important contribution. I hope we can move the Bill forward and ensure it does what we want it to do, while also protecting people.

When Deputy Donnelly was speaking I was trying to count up how many addresses I have had in my adult life. There are at least eight I can remember. I cannot remember the exact address of some of those. The nature of being a student or young person is that you move and 40 years later you do not remember where. The onus on us is to remember every single address, however. That is not the key issue because obviously it is on me to figure out where I lived. There are, however, people who lived in other jurisdictions and are now living and working in this State who have to go back to those jurisdictions or contact the relevant authorities in them to get a statement. It is overly bureaucratic.

Nobody is suggesting we should undermine in any way the protections of the vetting Act. Most of us are around long enough to remember when there was no Garda vetting bureau. The intention of the vast majority of people is to ensure that vetting is done well and quickly without undermining the protections that are provided in order that the bureau can do its work properly. The advantage of computerisation is that we should be able to do this much quicker. There should never be a delay once full access is granted. A register of consents we propose just makes life easier for people.

Only last week, I dealt with two young people who were delighted they had got a job in a major hospital in this city. They cannot take up the job even though both of them have vetting for different football clubs in the city. They are waiting again for vetting because they will be dealing with children or vulnerable people given the medical skills they have. That is going to be part of their life. If they move club or hospitals, they will have to get vetting each time. They cannot take up their new positions, even though they were told they were starting at the start of September. They now have to wait because CORU or some other body is applying for the vetting on behalf of whatever organisation in the hospital they will work for. While that is right, it should not delay somebody who has skills and has been in the system from taking up a job. They have been working but obviously because they are working as students, they are working under supervision in a different hospital where they may have had vetting already.

Many people turn to TDs and ask us whether we can help and we say “No” because the application has to work its way through the system. We try to help and try to encourage the system. In this case, we are trying to ensure that where people already have vetting, it can translate to other jobs so people have vetting for three years. If anything happens in those three years, the onus is obviously on the person who has given consent to ensure the bureau has full knowledge of it. The bureau itself will also ensure it has full knowledge of any court cases or anything untoward that is happening because that is part of its job. The problem with this, especially in the season we are in, is that a lot of people I know have been discouraged from volunteering for summer camps and so on, even though it is not that onerous.

People feel that it is only for three weeks and they could not be bothered. That should never be the case. In fairness the GAA clubs I have been with in my local area all have officers in charge who deal with the vetting and so on. They try to encourage parents who can play a role. It is a supervisory role but we still have to have the vetting process. The vetting process should never be a form of discouragement but at the moment, it is for a lot of people. They could not be bothered. They do not see why they need to do it or to go through this, that and the other. We should be making it easier for people to volunteer in society and to play as active a role as possible, while we are protecting those who are vulnerable and protecting children. That is the key in all of this. It does not matter if somebody gets the hump or loses a few weeks' wages. I am sorry but children's protection comes first. That puts an onus on us to make sure the system is working properly and is as effective as humanly possible. If we can take steps such as those suggested in this Bill to speed it up and make it more efficient, that is what we should be doing. Ní chóir go mbeadh aon mhaorlathas ann. The bureaucracy should not be there. We should not be slowed down by it.

Many people, myself included, do not understand the full nature of the vetting process. I have never had to apply for vetting. I am not a coach on a football team or involved in a scouting organisation. All my kids went through it but I was one of the lucky ones who could say I was stuck in here and did not have to volunteer at the weekends. At some stage I will be volunteering and, like most parents, whether it is helping the school out or the organisations, I will be going down that road in the future. I would hope it will be as effective as I have seen it, but more efficient. That is the key part of this.

I am greatly encouraged to see that Deputy Ó Snodaigh takes the same approach to volunteering as I do, which is that we do enough public service here. I cannot be baking tray-bakes and that. Perhaps when the electorate decides I need more time to bake tray-bakes and volunteer in different ways, I will spend my time doing that as well. In the meantime, I feel like I have a pass and now I feel legitimate in taking that approach considering it is Deputy Ó Snodaigh's approach as well. Excellent.

That being said, we are all here to do the same thing: to try to improve a vetting process and make it more efficient while being very effective. I do not have much space for the attitude that "I could not be bothered for a three-week camp" and so on. We cannot allow that sort of language to slip into this discourse at all. We know that predators, particularly predators of children, deliberately target vulnerable groups and sports groups. They do so in a deliberate and predatory way. They move from club to club, from community to community. The fact of having multiple addresses is inconvenient for a good person to whom this has never even occurred, but multiple addresses are a shield for the abuser as well.

Yes, we all want to do the same thing, totally in good faith, for the right reasons. I believe we are all having the same conversation. However, I remember back to the circumstances of the introduction of this legislation in 2012. I remember working with Frances Fitzgerald and Alan Shatter at that time. We brought in a suite of child protection measures. We provided for the creation of the Child and Family Agency, the precursor to Tusla. Before that, children's services were stuck in the HSE. I still recall the horror of the Tracey Fay report, published, I think, in 2010, and the failures by the HSE and management in the HSE in respect of children's services at that time. While there have been difficulties since then, of course, the creation of Tusla was an enormous step forward in terms of the focus on child protection. The children's referendum in 2012 enabled the State to intervene in family situations in a way that it felt it could not prior to that. It changed the balance to put the best interests of the child at the centre of the Irish Constitution to create children as individual rights-holders in and of themselves, as opposed to in a manner deriving from the fact of being in a family. That was a deeply significant, rights-based step forward by Alan Shatter, Frances Fitzgerald and the Government at the time. I refer also to the Garda vetting Bill of 2012 from the Department of Justice; the Criminal Justice (Withholding of Information on Offences against Children and Vulnerable Persons) Act 2012 that Alan Shatter brought in; and the Children First guidelines which were placed on a statutory basis in 2011 and, crucially, put mandatory reporting on a statutory basis.

The first document given to me when I came in to work in the Department of health and children was the Cloyne report, which details sexual abuse in the Catholic church up to 2007 and 2008 in the Cloyne diocese in County Cork. I could not understand how, in the wake of that report, there was any resistance by any organisation to put the mandatory reporting of an offence against a child on a statutory basis. I could not understand it. I remember the argument advanced by the Catholic Church at the time, which was that it would breach the seal of the confessional. Even if they were trying to win the argument, it was the wrong argument. There was a constitutionally based argument they could have used. It was the wrong argument but it was so gross to advance any argument against the requirement to report to the State and criminal authorities the fact that an offence against a child had taken place. The same legislative provision had existed in respect of white-collar offences for some time. That was the culture within which that suite of legislation was introduced.

Deputy Paul Donnelly correctly recalled the incident of the taxi driver more recently. He will also recall the systematic and predatory way in which abusers went from club to club, as we have seen over the last ten years. If we were having a different conversation, if an event had happened recently about a child abuse incident in any school, club or anything else, we would come here in a different way. We would preface our conversation by saying "I do not care how long the vetting process takes, you do it and that is all there is to it." We are saying the same thing. Sometimes it is just useful to flip the perspective to work out exactly how we would get it right. Although I would have liked it to be a little shorter, this review process is a good one. There is a good consultation. Let us look at the report that comes out and try to work out the tangible, practical way in which we can take this forward in a more efficient way, crucially with child protection absolutely at the centre, as the Deputy has said. It is not 12 years since that suite of legislation was enacted. We have an awful lot more work to continue to do but we are in a much better place than we were in 2010 and 2011 when this was so desperately needed. In this State, we are trying to continually improve our processes for everyone, and that is the spirit in which the Deputy has brought this legislation forward. We hope to be able to respond together in kind to improve it.

I am sharing time with my colleagues. I thank them for their contributions. I also thank the Minister of State and her officials. We, too, would hope to work with the Government. I note some of the issues the Minister of State has raised. I await with interest the review or report which is going to be published presently. I understand what she is saying about the difference in risk profiles. I think that probably the vast majority of cases will be of a similar level but that is certainly something we can tease out. I note what the Minister of State is saying about the potential increase in effort on the part of clubs or organisations. Usually the officer there will be used to dealing with it and will not have the resistance or allergy to bureaucracy that some applicants or volunteers would have, whereby if they see a five-page form they just push it away. That is also something that can be teased out.

We had a discussion with the OPLA about somebody who gives their consent to be included and allows the organisations to access information over a three-year period, but then changes their name in the intervening period. We can discuss that. Perhaps something could be provided for if it is shown they were doing it in a deliberate way. The wording was kept relatively vague in the proposal, knowing it would have to be scrutinised at a later stage. We want to ease the administration on the clubs and on the people but, most importantly, to protect the vulnerable adults and the children. We look forward to engaging with colleagues, officials and with the Minister of State on it as soon as possible.

I accept everything the Minister of State said. The Bill is about making sure children and vulnerable adults are safe. That is what is most important. There are different areas of risk. The Bill's provisions are relevant to people going for certain jobs or looking to do volunteering. During the Covid period, there were people in my area delivering food shopping to older people living singly. I wondered at the time about how those people might be vetted. The Bill is about maximising public safety. Its provisions will ensure vetting is really thorough and that vulnerable adults and children are safe. I am glad the Minister of State is supporting the Bill's progression to the next Stage.

This is the last business of the final day of this Dáil term. I thank the Minister of State for taking Second Stage. I thank all my colleagues. I thank all the Oireachtas staff, including the people who deal with the replies to our parliamentary questions. I wish everybody a pleasant summer.

I do not have much to add to what has been said by my colleagues. This important Bill needs to progress. I hope it is done in a speedy manner and that we have the opportunity to get it passed before the general election. I am not pre-empting the calling of the election. Perhaps the Minister of State will tell us today whether it will happen in September or October. I wish all my colleagues a good summer. I hope we come back refreshed in September and that the Bill is progressed as quickly as possible.

This is vital legislation. We must ensure we have absolute due diligence and a streamlined process in regard to vetting. I am saying more than I usually would while in the Chair. I received a telephone call just before the debate started concerning a new facility in County Louth to deal with vulnerable children. The caller is dealing with a particular issue and asked me whether I knew anybody in the Garda National Vetting Bureau. It goes to show the importance of this issue.