Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party)
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I want to dip into that drafting stuff, and I will in a second. One of the issues is the retrospective nature of these things. Contract law is primarily judge-made law. It is not written down, but it is still enforceable. The courts have been clear that a contract for something that is illegal is not a valid contract and the people who have signed it are not bound by it. The challenge there is that essentially you have to get a judge to say that. Otherwise, you are just going to be living in fear of whatever consequences you have agreed to and signed off on in the contract. This again is a case of where there is a very clear legal position and there is a very reasonable claim from somebody who is a victim of an illegal contract.

Although there is a clear legal position and a reasonable claim from a victim of an illegal contract, that person does not have the ability to challenge it because of the blockages in accessing court. This country lacks meaningful and effective civil legal aid. It is a major issue. If we want to deal with the retrospective nature of NDAs, then functioning civil legal aid and access to justice would enable individuals to challenge them and get the protections to which they are entitled. However, we must stay on topic, so I will leave the question of civil legal aid there.

Questions have been asked repeatedly about the drafting process. The Minister asked for this measure to be prioritised but it was not ready for inclusion in the stamped draft. One of the questions that we all wanted an answer to was that of what stopped it from being ready on time. I would like an answer.

I am curious about how many drafters there are and whether their number is sufficient. If the drafters are from the Attorney General’s office and are being shared out across Departments, are there sufficient drafters across the Government to get work done? We all know how slow things can be in this place. Can we get more drafters seconded in, be it from the Office of the Attorney General or another Department that is not so legislatively heavy and has a spare drafter, or can we bring someone in on a special contract to ensure this Bill gets done? There are plenty of areas where we do not have enough civil servants to make decisions and I would hate to see this important legislation being lost because we have not resourced the Civil Service properly.