Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. Essentially, the legislation before the committee this afternoon allows for the continued independent functioning of the Marine Casualty Investigation Board. This committee has undertaken a lot of work in this area over recent months. It sought pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill, but the Marine Casualty Investigation Board and the Department repeatedly stated that this was technical, time-sensitive legislation and there was a need to expedite matters and so, reluctantly, we agreed to allow things to move apace. We did not fully agree with it, but we recognised that the legislation needed to progress quickly. As I said, we reluctantly agreed to waive pre-legislative scrutiny, but it is important to note that that waiver had important conditionality built into it. We demanded that the Department would make publicly available the Clinch report.