Joe Costello (Dublin Central, Labour)

I thank the Minister for her reply. Rather than undermining the position we have proposed, I thought the Minister supported it. She said that what is included in the amendments is not precisely what is referred to in the relevant text. I am trying to ensure that the relevant texts from the Schengen agreement are in the text of the Bill. If the Minister disagrees with me as to what should be inserted, the parliamentary draftsman should determine what is precisely relevant. Are Protocols 2 or 3 relevant, or both of them? The Minister said she thought that Protocol 2 alone was relevant. If that is the case, let us insert it in the legislation so that the ordinary person who may wish to access the legislation will be able to do so without having to visit the Law Library or find it on the Internet. It is difficult for a lay person to plough through the entire Schengen agreement. These European treaties are not easy for the lay person to interpret. People make a living from interpreting them and are well paid to do so. Our learned friends do exceptionally well in respect of these treaties but the ordinary citizen does not. What is the sense in us simply passing law for the benefit of a few learned people who can get through the technicalities of complex documentation? Surely we in this House have a duty to put as much facilitating material as possible into legislation. Where we refer to protocols and treaties, we should put those texts into the legislation. In this case, we are not dealing with an enormous amount of text so there is no basis to the Minister's objection. We are only talking about a couple of pages of text. From what the Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Hanafin, said, it is probably less than what I have suggested. If the Minister, Deputy McDowell, is not happy with the text I have presented in these amendments, he should tailor it to the specific needs of the legislation. He should not use an extraneous argument for not making the legislation as accessible as possible to the lay person as well as to professionals.

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