John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Sometimes I feel like it is groundhog day in here. We made decisions as a committee last week. It seems that when a decision is made, we come back the following week and question that decision and find ourselves on a completely different course. Some of us raised the point that, regardless of how the legislation is written, there will always be different opinions on different laws. We received one opinion. The senior counsel acting on behalf of the whistleblower gave a completely different take on the legislation. There might be two other completely different takes on both those legal opinions if a person tried hard enough to find them.

We should wait and see what the Revenue Commissioners have to say on this issue before spending taxpayers' money on getting a second opinion. Ultimately, it will come down to the interpretation of the Act. I thought we had made a decision last week; we cannot continue coming back and redrawing decisions that have already been made. My understanding of what happened last week was that the legal advisers were to be here today to reiterate their advice on the specific issue of the whistleblower's attendance and the implications for him personally. We did it that way because the Comptroller and Auditor General made the point that if we had the whistleblower before the committee it might compound things negatively. For that reason, we wanted clarification from our legal advisers and the parliamentary legal advisers. It is like Groundhog Day here. I am experiencing a bit of déjà vu and I do not know why we are turning back on decisions we made last week.