A Bill to define and ban child pornography is one of nine to be brought to the Dail in the current session by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
The Department's Bills represent almost half the legislation to be considered by the Oireachtas during the session. The Child Pornography Bill will be a landmark piece of legislation. If passed, it will be the first statutory definition of pornography.
At present it is left to the Censorship of Publications Board and the Film Censor's Office to decide what should be banned.
Officials at the Department have been working on proposed definitions of child pornography ahead of publication of the Bill. Two sets of wordings are being considered.
The first prohibits "a photographic, film, video or other visual representation that shows a person who is or is depicted to be a child and is engaged in or is depicted as being engaged in explicit sexual activity". A second definition refers to "depiction for a sexual purpose" of specific parts of a child's anatomy.
The Bill will attempt to cover all media including the written word and images on the Internet. A "child", for the purposes of the Bill, will be aged 16 or younger.
The gaps in the legal system regarding pornography have become more apparent as the business has grown in the State. Importers of seized pornographic material have often been prosecuted on technical grounds such as not paying import duties or selling videos which carry no certificate, as there has been no effective procedure for prosecuting them over the material's content.
The Bill's definitions of pornography will be carefully scrutinised, as they could raise concerns that art or family photographs could inadvertently be covered by the law. Of the remaining eight departmental Bills for this session, the ail this gives legal effect to the intelligence-gathering office in The Hague which helps EU police forces in investigations of organised crime. The Criminal Justice Bill will introduce 10-year mandatory sentences for drug-traffickers found with drugs worth £10,000 or more.
The Children (Juvenile Justice) Bill will try to define parental responsibility for children.