Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

No. The Deputy has raised an interesting point and I should have explained it. The process is to find out what is constitutionally permissible. Each of the sections outlines the legal advice, the external legal advice and all the discussion we have had on what is constitutionally permissible in the types of inquiry laid out in the Bill. It is not legally permissible to have a real hybrid that does a bit of both. If one is to have an inquiry limited to recording and reporting evidence, one would have to conclude it and report on it and then embark on the next bit of it. Legally, one cannot intersperse the two types of inquiry because one has to have a constitutional grounding for each bit of it.