Mairéad Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is unfortunate my amendments were ruled out of order. Amendment No. 7 was designed to support recommendations 12, 16 and 70 as submitted by SIPO in May 2019 as part of the second legislative review of the Regulation of Lobbying Act 2015. Section 18 of that Act outlines what are called "relevant contraventions" of the Act. SIPO has the power to investigate these relevant contraventions. A person who commits one of these relevant contraventions is guilty of an offence and liable on summary conviction to a class C fine or, on conviction on indictment, to a fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or both. This amendment would have inserted three new subsections with regard to relevant contraventions. The other amendment adds three additional actions to what qualifies as a relevant contravention and can be investigated and sanctioned by the commission.

As these two amendments are linked I thought it best to explain them together but the most important of these is a failure of former Ministers, Ministers of State, special advisers and senior civil servants to comply with the cooling-off period. It makes a breach of section 22 a relevant contravention under the Act and gives SIPO the power to investigate and sanction former Ministers, Ministers of State, special advisers and senior civil servants who fail to comply with the cooling-off period. This has been ruled out order and I do not believe it should have been. I appreciate that, as the Minister said, it is not a decision for him. However, this amendment should not have been ruled out, arguably even more so than the previous one, because it was based on direct recommendations by SIPO. It is almost word for word what the commission told us to do. SIPO did not tell us to give it additional powers and additional resources to carry them out. As it seems the commission was more than capable of doing so within its existing budget, the idea this creates an additional charge on the taxpayer is fanciful. As I said, I appreciate it was not the Minister who ruled this out but it is very unfortunate this has been done because we had worked so well on this Bill.