Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The committee met yesterday. I have listened to other speakers this morning. As a public representative and member of this committee, my job is to scrutinise every Bill introduced. I would not be doing my job if I did not push for scrutiny of this Bill, although, as mentioned by other speakers, we do not have it in front of us today. It is members' duty to scrutinise Bills.

What has happened today cannot go unnoted. This will become a precedent. If this Bill is allow to proceed without pre-legislative scrutiny, we will be setting a precedent such that any Bill can go through without the scrutiny of this committee. This committee might as well not exist then. As public representatives and members of this committee, it is our job to ensure the Bill is put before us for scrutiny and to ensure all renters are protected therein but this does not do that. We need to put down a marker today that this committee will not accept this. We need the information we are supposed to have to enable us to scrutinise a Bill.

I want to ensure everyone is protected. Everyone here has a job to do in terms of representing their constituencies. Our main objective is to hold Government to account and we are here today to do that. As mentioned by a previous speaker, if a copy of the Bill had been made available to us today, we could have scrutinised it.

I came up from Limerick today at short notice because we could not vote if we were not in Leinster House. I was available all week, and I am available for the rest of the week, to scrutinise this Bill. Why can we not have the Bill in front of us to scrutinise it? All members of the committee would have made time to be available. It is disappointing the Bill is not in front of us.

I will not make a point of not being here to scrutinise the Bill. We will be here to scrutinise it and to hold the Government to account, no matter who it is. We will make sure we will do the right thing for renters to ensure they are all protected. I am not a "Yes" person for anyone. I want to make sure all Bills sent to this committee are scrutinised before they go forward.