Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I want to address some of those matters. The Tánaiste's letter yesterday made the point that the Bill itself was, in essence, a Government Bill from 2007 on to which we added other aspects to deal with maternal deaths and all the rest of it. If the Department had turned around since November and said that changes had happened to measures and that it wanted to deal with that - which is kind of what it was saying - and that it had set up a working group, that the model might be different, and that it would liaise with us, and that it intended for something to happen, we could have lived with that and worked with it. That is precisely why we gave it all the time we did to get us to Committee Stage. What galls me is that, against my 60 amendments to the Bill there is not a single amendment from the Department of Justice and Equality. The Tánaiste, when I raised it yesterday, said that the Department could not really do anything until it knew whether there was a money message or not. That is not the case, because it was supposed to be working on this in any event. That is what it told us.

I genuinely believe, though it is not vindictive, that there has been a breach of trust here with this committee and the Department because of this. If our views are going to be respected, then we have to do something. I agree with that. I will use whatever leverage is possible to ensure that these provisions get enacted before the summer. I do not see how that miracle is going to be pulled off. I will talk to the Tánaiste about that in detail. I do not see anything wrong with focusing the attention. We are not saying that we are not going to co-operate with any legislation, but that this one has to prioritised. We will deal with the others once this one is dealt with. We would then make it in the Department's interests to deal with this one as quickly as possible. I think we need to do that because of the content of the issue.

I think about the people who had organised child-minding, days off work, volunteers, midwives and bereaved fathers who have made this project their goal. This Bill went through Second Stage in 2015. They have been waiting for that ever since, going around the country, advocating support and so on. The Department needs to deliver on this now, so what better way than to tell it that it can work on this Bill now because that is what we are prioritising?