Joe O'Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I trust the Minister of State's the bona fides. She is an eminent lawyer. She will get this aspect right. With great respect to our distinguished company here, and I have been on this committee for a year, I am of the view that we are soon going to have to move away from the navel-gazing and semantic discussions that have been going on ad nauseam.

A number of members do not have the self-confidence to say it here - not that I have an abundance of it myself, but I have enough to make this point - but they are disgusted at the way this committee is going. It is constantly a semantic debating society, with us splitting hairs the whole time and nothing actually happening. Let us start making things happen. Let us start accepting the Minister of State’s bona fides and that she will sort out the third scenario to the degree possible within the law. She cannot break the law. She cannot put the State at risk of significant legal action arising from advices and responses to advice. Insofar as she can provide the information without putting the State at risk, though, she will do so. She has already stated that we will get the initial position of the Department, which we all know will be substantively the finished product. She has moved extraordinarily expeditiously and seriously on the cases against our country. That is the most important use of today’s meeting, although the rest is critical, too.

We should accept the Minister of State’s bona fides, await her reverting to us after a round of discussions on and analysis of the third scenario, and proceed with our work. There is an old expression in rural Ireland that has merit in this discussion: “You cannot spend all the time weighing the pig; you have to spend some time feeding it.” We are perpetually weighing the damn pig.