Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 16 December 2021
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach
General Scheme of Insurance (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2021: Discussion
Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)
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We are deleting the section in the existing Act and bringing in a new section to give legal privilege to certain documents. We were concerned that, the way the 2019 legislation was drafted, any new information would be required to be shared. That might have compromised the important principle of legal privilege so we are bringing forward measures to ensure such documents have to be shared providing they do not breach legal privilege. Documents which have legal privilege will not have to be shared but those that do not require legal privilege can be shared. The existing regime was unclear on that and that is why there was a situation where no documents could possibly have been shared because of the legal privilege issue. We are separating documents that require privilege from those that do not.