Mark Daly (Fianna Fail)
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This comes back to a fundamental lack of transparency by Government. The way in which this is done is that Ministers are presented with draft statutory instruments that were never given to the Dáil, Seanad or relevant committee. Then we see fines being imposed and revisions of draft statutory instruments. As I have stated many times, until the human tissue Bill was introduced, the only organ donor legislation in the history of the State was signed by the Minister for Health in August ten years ago, with four weeks to go to the deadline, and the health committee, Dáil and Seanad never saw it. My concern is that it was not published in advance and was so badly drafted that it had to be revised two years later with 16 additional pages, which again nobody saw before the Minister signed it.

Our fundamental principle is that draft statutory instruments should be made available to this committee at an early time and it should not be the case that no time is given at the relevant committee. The idea that an earlier version would lead to confusion is not a great response from the Department, in that any version is better than no version. The public does not have great faith in this, arising from the fact that there is no scrutiny of EU legislation, which accounts for far more legislation than all the legislation passed by the Dáil and Seanad every year.