Paul Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and his officials and compliment him on bringing the Bill to this stage. The review of the 2001 Act has been ongoing for a long time. I recall we had many wholehearted discussions on it during the previous committee. I usually sat in this corner, with the Minister by my side. It would be remiss of me not to mention my former constituency colleague, Willie Penrose, who was very vocal on this issue in particular at the previous committee. It is positive to see it now at a stage where we are conducting prelegislative scrutiny.

I welcome the Bill and the merits of it. I am fully in agreement with it. I have a couple of questions, which mainly come from the interactions we had at our previous meetings on this issue with the farming bodies. They queried how we will maintain independence given the chairperson will be a ministerial appointment. They would have liked to see a scenario where the board, once appointed, would pick its own chair. I am not asking for that but it was raised with us. Within that, the bodies made strong arguments for the inclusion of farmers’ representatives on the board as per a follow-on from the farmers' charter. Those were the asks the farmers' associations had and perhaps they could be tweaked in some way. They wanted to highlight the issue of independence. The argument at the moment for the need for the independent appeals board is that most appeals officers tend to be retired departmental officials who then hear appeals against former colleagues. It was argued that if the chairman is a ministerial appointment, that will remain nearly the status quo. It is something that could be taken into consideration.

The other issue the farming bodies raised, with which I would be more in agreement and perhaps it could be incorporated into the Bill, relates to remote hearings by electronic means at the discretion of the appeals officer. There should be some provision such that there can be remote or electronic hearings at the discretion of the appeals officer but only with the agreement of the appellant. Not every farmer has the same secretarial back-up or the same technology to undertake an appeal online where the official side can submit documents and so on. If the farmer or whoever did not have secretarial back-up or access to the same technological services and was working off, as I do, paper, there could be a mismatch.

It would need to be stated that it could only be electronically held at the appeals officer's discretion with the agreement of the appellant.

I welcome the change being made to the Aquaculture Licences Appeals Board. It would be disingenuous of us, as politicians, not to warmly welcome that because we are all beating the drum at the moment for school bus drivers over 70 to be allowed to continue drive. If we think somebody over 70 can drive a school bus, then he or she can certainly sit on an appeals board. That has to be welcomed and it was ageist for a limit to have been written in there in the first place. I suppose it was written in at a different time and we could not write that into any rules or regulations in the present day.

The other issue that came up with the farm organisations was the timescale. When somebody has gotten as far as an appeal, it means he or she has been waiting for money for a while. If the appeal is ultimately successful, that means that the person has been left in need of money for a period through no fault of his or her own. The longer it drags on, the greater the hardship. I look forward to seeing this up and running and operating on as tight a timescale as possible.

Finally, something was said to me recently and I would like the Minister to comment. A rugby analogy was made with reference to the new bunker system, whereby the referee can give a yellow card but the final decision is transferred to an independent third party. A lot of commentators say that referees are not making the decisions any more or at least, not making a lot of the decisions that they could make. While I welcome this move, which is well-intentioned, I would not like to a similar situation to arise whereby there is an inspector on a farm and there is grey area or a 50:50 situation about which the inspector might normally have told the farmer to do X, Y and Z and he or she would be out the gap this time. I would not like inspectors to start feeling they have the safety net of an independent appeals process and then when a 50:50 situation arises, they opt not to pass and the farmer has to bring an independent appeal for somebody else to make the decision. If that attitude was taken, we could end up with more appeals resulting in a backlog and the timescales I mentioned earlier might not be achievable. It was an interesting comment that was made to me and it got me thinking about it. When watching the rugby, people will hear a lot of commentary about the fact that referees will not make decisions any more because they know that somebody who is independent of them will make the decision for them. I would not like to see that situation arising where we have more penalties being applied because officials decide they will not make the decision, that it is a 50:50 scenario and they will let someone else decide on it, given that the facility is there and the process is independent.