Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It did.

I fully accept the extraordinary work of Deputy Lawless’s committee and its legislative workload. It has been substantive. I take the Deputy’s point about the loading of legislation and then a valley period and the withdrawal of Bills at short notice. That should not happen. There should be a back-up all of the time to make sure that is a continuous pipeline of legislation. Justice is one area where there is a significant pipeline of legislation. That has always tended to be the case. I am interested in what the Deputy is saying. There are different perspectives on pre-legislative scrutiny, which has probably gone far beyond what people might have envisaged it to be originally. There are essentially two Committees Stages now as well. That lengthens the time for legislation to get through the House. Originally, my sense of pre-legislative scrutiny when it was conceived and agreed in 2016 was that it would be a technical pre-legislative scrutiny to make sure the Bill was literate and that it made sense etc. However, it has become a much a bigger operation now. That is something that will come forward in discussions.