Mr. Liam Herrick:

I can only go on what the final report of the committee recommended, which was a simple proposal that the Minister should continue to be in a position to put forward and sign regulations but that they should be laid before the Oireachtas and would lapse after a period if they were not approved.

We might also look at simple recommendations from the Trinity College Dublin Covid observatory, for example, that there should, at a minimum, be consultation with the Oireachtas before new legislation was introduced and that the Minister should be under an obligation to at least publish regulations before they came into effect. As members of the committee will know, over the past 14 months, we have seen on a number of occasions that regulations have been signed into effect by the Minister for Health and were not even been made public, which is clearly an infringement on the rule of law.

These are simple and quite modest recommendations that have been made to Government over the past year on having better practice in terms of respect for the rule of law. It is very disappointing that the Minister and the Government do not seem to have reflected on any of these recommendations. The Government has not put forward any review to the Oireachtas when it is looking for this extension of powers. Certainly, if we go back to March 2020 when the legislation was first enacted and passed by both Houses then signed into law by the President, it was clear to everybody at that stage that if there were to be subsequent renewals, there would be an opportunity for the Oireachtas to have a meaningful debate with meaningful reviews put before it. That did not happen in October 2020 and it clearly is not happening now.