Mr. Jim Dorney:

Yes it is. Some of the work, including the Payment of Wages Act, is straightforward. One examines the legislation and the situation, but unfair dismissal is a complex area and I do not believe it can or should be dealt with by one person.

The other area where the Minister has made a mistake is to suggest that the hearings would be in private. We can go into all sorts of technical detail about the European Convention on Human Rights and so on. Deputy McNamara of the Labour Party has done that in the public press but I put it to members that hearings should be in public for one simple reason, namely, it induces the parties to settle. Nobody wants to wash dirty linen in public and if someone comes to a public hearing he or she will do the utmost to settle whether an employer or a worker. To lose that on a pragmatic basis would be a mistake.

The Minister has left so perhaps I will leave my comments on another area that may be controversial. It was about the question of the reversal of the number of persons who went to rights commissioners and to the tribunal. It was the case until recently that 60% of the people went to the tribunal. The majority of them bypassed the rights commissioner, for whatever reason, but if the Minister is trying to coerce people to go to the rights commissioner is he not sending them to where they do not want to go, if members follow the argument? They might like to think that about.