Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

The Minister should have known better. It was a contemptuous way to treat the House. I object to the Minister's methodology and to his attitude to his presence in the House. His manner of dealing with legislation is unacceptable. We have raised this issue before and need the Ceann Comhairle's guidance. The Minister first presented this Bill two years ago. Now as the session ends he says the Bill must be guillotined and presents a stack of new amendments.

He does this with every Bill. On leaving this House every Bill is more than double its original size, through amendments from the Minister — he does not accept our amendments. He never thinks out fully what he intends to do and as a result we receive an ad hoc amalgam of legislation that is a set of proposals without any coherent philosophy.

In this case there are two green books of amendments, one provided the day before yesterday, one yesterday, and there are white pages of the Minister's amendments, which are not included in the normal green book because the Minister is keeping them separate for himself. This is the height of inefficiency. We must try to plough through different groups of amendments to find our place in the debate.

The Minister has included 34 amendments in his booklet, making a total of more than 300 amendments to deal with today. There is not the slightest hope that we will reach the seminal amendments introduced by the Minister. Many of these are amendments to which he has agreed kicking and screaming after we insisted on having at least some debate on the reports of the Morris tribunal.

We made statements only on Friday but at least we had a further debate in Private Members' time last night and the day before. There has been some attempt to tease out the implications of the Morris reports and to acknowledge that Mr. Justice Morris specifically requested this House to review the Garda Síochána Bill.

Some of the Minister's amendments are good. I am pleased he has taken on our idea for a whistleblower's charter. That is an excellent amendment for which we have long pressed. I am also pleased he has taken on board several of our proposals regarding the ombudsman's commission and that it has a different shape now from when the Minister embarked on this proposal two years ago. There is a significant proposal to roll out CCTV around the country in the interests of security which is very valuable.

I am not pleased, however, that these measures, plus several other controversial measures, will be nodded through without our having the opportunity to discuss them. It would have been proper to recommit them so we could have a full debate but we will not reach them on Report Stage because of the lack of time and the guillotine.

One controversial amendment is the summary entitlement to be granted to the Garda Commissioner to dismiss members of the Garda Síochána, ordinary gardaí, sergeants and inspectors, that cut across the Garda Representative Association and the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors. Both associations are angry about this because they regard it as an issue for conciliation and arbitration. Yesterday the Minister presented a summary amendment to the Garda Representative Association instead of bringing forward a proposal for conciliation.

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