Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

As we approach this Bill, one wonders what the views would have been of those who worked and fought for Irish independence in that it has taken over 80 years to repeal statutes that existed prior to independence. Even at that, we are only dealing with statutes that are redundant.

The Bill before us is the product of a fairly lengthy process. The strategic management initiative working group on regulatory reform produced its report, Reducing Red Tape — An Action Programme of Regulatory Reform in Ireland, in 1999. The report followed Delivering Better Government, which was published in 1996 and outlined the principles that should underpin regulatory reform. It stated that the quality rather than the quantity of regulations should be improved; unnecessary and inefficient regulations, including legislation, should be eliminated; necessary regulation and related procedures should be simplified as much as possible; the cost of regulatory cost should be lowered; and regulations should be made more accessible to the public. In each case the public interest should be protected.

The commitment was to make legislation more coherent and easily accessible to those who need it. As part of the process, the Government likes to trumpet that a separate unit to address the issue, the statute law revision and consolidation unit, was established in the Office of the Attorney General. This was merely the restoration of a unit which had previously been suppressed as a cost-cutting measure for many years. The current impenetrable state of the Statute Book is a result of the failure to maintain that unit throughout those years. If it is now agreed that poor regulatory practices impose additional costs on business and administration, it is worth remembering that the practices were imposed to save costs in the first place.

The process of reviewing our regulatory system culminated in the 2004 Government White Paper, Regulating Better. The paper made the commitment on behalf of the Office of the Attorney General that:

A programme (under the remit of the Statute Law Revision Unit) will be put in place to analyse pre-1922 legislation with a view to:

Identifying moribund legislation and repealing it through the introduction of a Bill;

Re-enacting legislation that is still useful, removing anomalies in the process; and

Streamlining/simplifying the Statute Book as necessary.

The promised delivery date was spring 2004. In fairness to this Bill, which perhaps intends to deliver on the first of the three commitments, it was published in November last year, a mere six months late. We have heard nothing of the other two commitments, the re-enactment of still useful legislation and the streamlining and simplification of the Statute Book.

When the Bill was first published it included just 90 Acts, constituting the sum total of legislation produced over 687 years that is no longer useful, relevant or even comprehensible. However, the statute law revision unit's own website stated that it had identified approximately 100 Acts that possibly needed to be repealed. A consultation process was initiated with Departments and other relevant bodies to confirm that these laws were no longer in use. The Bill before us was amended in the Seanad to provide for a total of 219 Acts to be repealed. These include legislation governing the British civil list, German reparations, the tobacco plantation trade and the Veterinary Surgeons Act 1881. One might question why that statute was not repealed when the Houses dealt with what is now the Veterinary Practice Act 2005.

The statute law revision unit has stated that it plans to continue to advise the Government on the modernisation of the remaining pre-1922 legislation, such as repeal and re-enactment with absurdities removed. The word "absurdities" is the unit's own. It is shocking to think that those in charge of the state and health of the Statute Book consider some of the legislation under their remit to be absurd. Four years ago, an 1854 provision was repealed that made it a criminal offence to beat or shake a carpet, rug or mat after 9 a.m. However, it was considered necessary to retain in force provisions in the same Act that deal with furious driving by jarvies. The Act also empowered a garda to drive away an unattended hackney carriage and deposit it in a neighbouring livery stable. These provisions remain on the Statute Book.

The statute law revision unit is meanwhile in charge of producing codified statute law restatements, of which there have been four since the enabling Act was passed in 2002. Much work is needed in this area to restore a coherent framework to the legislation that we have passed since independence. If anyone interested in the process, be they layman or lawyer, is asked to identify the laws still in force governing the courts system, for example, they will quickly get lost.

The unit also compiles and publishes the indices to statutes which must be consulted to ascertain what legislation is in operation and what has been amended by subsequent enactments. These indices are not available until the end of the year following the year of enactment. This task of revision, restatement, consolidation and repeal of what is by now 770 years of legislation is entrusted to a staff of two. According to the website the permanent resources of the SLRU comprise a director at assistant secretary grade and a deputy director at assistant principal grade. With the best will in the world it is difficult to see how a unit with such meagre resources can deliver on the commitments set in the Office of the Attorney General's revised action plan which was published earlier this year.

The same two-person unit plans to devise a comprehensive database of all pre-1922 public general legislation. Work was due to commence in April 2005. The database will provide a template for future statute law revision and will be electronically accessible by the end of 2005. That should not be as difficult as it sounds as the bulk of the work has already been done in Northern Ireland where an on-line version of the complete Statute Book has been available for some years. When one considers that both jurisdictions shared an identical Statute Book until 1922, one wonders why formal co-operation in this area was not identified as an obvious area for North-South co-operation.

The statute law revision unit has stated that arising from the continued study of pre-1922 legislation, it is anticipated that a further revision Bill may be required to repeal a considerable number of additional Acts. An assessment is also being undertaken on the possibility of publishing by the end of 2005 a new type of revision Act which would depart from the normal statute law revision mechanism of repeal which is essentially negative. This Bill would positively list all remaining legislation to give clarity to citizens and legal professionals as to precisely what pre-1922 legislation remains in force. It is not until that programme has been completed that the final stage will be embarked on. The Government envisages that a programme of re-enactment and repeal of remaining pre-1922 legislation would be subsequently commenced on a Department by Department basis.

There are those who would argue that delivering better government must mean getting by with less government, less bureaucracy and less regulation. If that is the case, however, one must hire more than two officials to go about the job of identifying the rules which one wants to repeal. The 1999 report made the following comment:

It is time consuming and demanding of resources, both political and administrative, to consolidate primary legislation. However, the consolidation of regulations is relatively straightforward. In view of this as a general rule, where new regulations are being promulgated, existing regulations in the same area should be consolidated.

Needless to say, that recommendation has also been consistently ignored.

The Labour Party welcomes this Bill. We will give it constructive consideration on Second Stage and on Committee Stage, but as the authors of the Bill might say, "some done, and much more to do."

See this speech in context