Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

As Deputy Rabbitte has said, we have extended the scheme, which arose from primary legislation in the two jurisdictions, at Westminster and here in the Oireachtas. We rolled over the regulations every year since in the hope that after three rounds of decommissioning we will achieve an end to the process, as we almost did in the discussions of 8 December. We are keeping those regulations in place in the hope that we may return to this issue again.

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