Flawed system let childcare lobbyist slip through net

There is something fundamentally flawed with our safeguards against sex offenders if an Irishman convicted of offences in the Netherlands can not alone work with young people here, but effectively lobby for legal changes as well.Niall McElwee has now paid a high price for his crime, losing his career and his growing reputation in the area of childcare and drug abuse.Those who defend him will argue that his work played a huge part in furthering the protection of children from preying careworkers. But the mere fact that he continued to lobby and campaign for such vetting procedures is richly ironic given that he slipped through that net himself.There are no degrees of guilty when it comes to the sexual abuse of under-age children — the fact they might be five or fifteen is entirely irrelevant. And nobody should have been more aware of that than a Third Level lecturer who was working in this area in the first place.As the director of the Centre for Child and Youth Care Learning at Athlone IT, the Athenry-based lecturer surely must have known that his position was untenable and that the truth would always come out.It may well have been a moment of drunken madness in a Dutch hotel and out of character for a man who patently sees his role as a crusader in the fight against child sex abuse, but most of us thankfully never resort to such appalling and unacceptable behaviour in any circumstances.One wonders how the liberal Dutch couldn’t see a prison term as the correct response to such an offence, but that’s something their judicial system has to live with.Our responsibility is to make sure that those who perpetrate such crimes do not have access to minors in this jurisdiction.And Dr. McElwee most certainly did.He didn’t even seek to adopt a low profile in the aftermath of his offence — indeed quite the contrary, given his high profile pronouncements on the level of hard drug abuse in the Midlands and South East.He now finds himself in the spotlight in a manner he most certainly would not have wished for.But there is a price to be paid for inflicting such unacceptable trauma on minors — and Dr. McElwee is finding out just how high a price that can be.