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

I think we are doing all right with the timeframe.

I came in to ask questions about the Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO, because we had the Minister in last week in this regard. I had questions that we agreed I could bring forward to this week. I will start off with those.

As the Minister knows, we had long discussions about the ethics review. I have been very clear about my concern. It was not that the review was a kicking-the-can-down-the-road exercise but more that it was doing something about which we knew many of the issues lay and what needed to be changed. In many ways, the review has covered what was previously raised in the Public Sector Standards Bill. That Bill was before my time here but it seems it dealt comprehensively with many of the major ethics issues. It was a Bill with one of the highest numbers of amendments obstructing it. I understand that all parties agreed with it. We regularly see issues in terms of ethics. While we discussed this subject at length in light of the lobbying review at the time in question and the matter of freedom of information, the ethics review is now being hailed as the way forward. However, my concern was always that it was in some ways not dealing with the crux of the issue. While it covered the issues that need to be addressed, we already had legislation on which we knew there was cross-party support. On the back of the ethics review, what are the Minister's next steps? Considering that the Public Sector Standards Bill indicated what is still regarded as needing change, will the Government reintroduce that? I looked at the legislative programme and did not see the legislation in it.