Matt Carthy (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State and his officials for attending. I have not been a Member of this House for very long but I imagine this is a fairly unique scenario in that a Minister of State is saying to a committee that it should proceed with pre-legislative scrutiny of a Bill whose precise outcome we do not know. As both members who spoke before me indicated, one very pertinent point has been subject to all the written observations the committee has received and all the interactions we have had with organisations. It has been the subject of a report the committee produced and the Minister of State cannot give us an answer as to what the Bill will look like. It boils down to the issue of responsible persons.

In the Minister of State's view, as somebody who is as well aware of the sector as anybody in the room, would he have considered what responsible persons in licensed merchants, for example, were doing over recent years as essentially the same as prescribing?