Irish father 'offered to abuse daughter online'
An Irish man offered to sexually abuse his daughter online for another man to watch, according to the latest volume of cases released from the Child Care Law Reporting Project.
The man did not realise the person he was conversing with in a chat room was an undercover policeman in another jurisdiction, who immediately contacted the gardaí and the man was arrested.
The application for an order to take his daughter into care has been protracted and a specialist assessment of the child has been ordered before a final ruling is made.
Director of the Child Law Project, Carol Coulter, says child sex abuse cases face delays because there are no specialist units in some parts of the country.
"Child sex abuse is a very, very difficult thing to establish or to diagnose and that's one of the things we saw," Ms Coulter said.
"Very often, it's by no means certain that the child was abused or that they were abused by the person who is closest to them in their family.
"The lack of adequate assessments of child sex abuse in some parts of the country was one of the things we came up against," she added.
The Child Care Law Reporting Project is an independent project established under Section 3 of the Child Care (Amendment) Act 2007 to provide information to the public on child care proceedings in the courts and to conduct research on these proceedings.
