Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

-----by the ingenuity of the Parliamentary Counsel to have sabre clauses. The most egregious for democracy I always found was the normal sabre clause in Bills where at the end of a Bill the Minister is deemed to have the power to do anything that might occur to him or her in the event that the powers are not contained in it. We do not have that sabre clause in this legislation, but Members will find that the Parliamentary Counsel and the team who worked on this legislation were extraordinary thorough. They found enactments - unfortunately, the Members will not be exposed to them because they were measures we expunged from the purview of the Minister for Finance in the other House - which related to functions going back to Victorian times that were transposed into the authority of the Minister for Finance on the creation of the State in regard to corn and all sorts of interesting matters that have long since ceased to be of direct relevance to the Minister for Finance and over which he has no control now.