Dr. Maeve O'Rourke:

I would like to comment on the legal basis for this and my personal experience of trying to figure out what the law was on behalf of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL. I spent at least eight hours trying to read the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 in order to check whether the law actually said what the grid in the appendix to the guide published by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection claimed that it said. I was literally tearing my hair out. That Act, as we said in our submissions, has been amended by five different Acts, or at least, five amending Acts have been referred to by the Department. In order to try to read it, one has to go onto www.irishstatutebook.ieand find the text of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005. The original 2005 Act can be seen there. Then, one must click on the list of amendments, statutory instruments etc. This leads to a list which must include more than 1,000 amendments, as there are already about 350 sections in the Act, practically all of which have been amended in some way, shape or form.

On the left of the screen the heading "S. 263(1C)" appears, and alongside that is an outline of the ways the section has been amended. If one clicks on the "S. 263(1C)", the website returns to section 263 of the 2005 Act, because the "C" is not actually a hyperlink. A reader must figure out what section 263(1C) currently states. It may have been amended several times to arrive at the 2017 version or 2018 version of S. 263(1C). These must be patched together. I could not do it. I called the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection and asked if the officials there had an internal version of the consolidated Act that they use to come up-----