Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am sure there will be resistance. That is all the more reason to push against it. This committee's remit was given by the Dáil reform committee, not by the Government. There were extensive discussions at meetings of the Dáil reform committee on the legal aspects. We do not need to get caught up in a legal quagmire.

We have already discussed a lot of the legal powers around money Bills and so on. While the committee should bring in legal advice, we should not tie ourselves up in legal knots. This is central to Dáil reform, part of which is reform of the public service. As much as I respect what Deputy Pearse Doherty had to say, the Dáil reform committee and the Taoiseach himself said in the Dáil that part of how this is done is actually in the doing. How do we know what to write, if we do not get the Secretaries General into the committee to tease out matters? I am not saying they are the devil incarnate. However, it would be good to hear from them because they might have reasons for this. The only way to find out what the real reasons, or the real arguments, are is through the actual sharing of information about this economic statement due to be published next week. We must intersect on that and actually test to see could we review it before it is printed. That is how one finds out where the power lines between the permanent Government and the Parliament lie. That is a not a small task to work out and one cannot do it if the permanent Government is not here.