Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Labour)

I thank the officials from the Department for their assistance and for the time they have devoted to the legislation. I also thank the Minister for taking on board a number of amendments suggested by the Opposition. However, I protest at the manner in which this Bill has been handled. As Deputy Olivia Mitchell stated, it was published in 2001. Committee Stage was very tortuous and was taken on several sessions in 2003. We returned to it two years later with a raft of amendments and it had to be recommitted. More unexpected amendments were tabled at the end of this process and we have just dealt with a further 53 amendments made in the Seanad. It is clear that the Bill has not been handled properly. I do not know why that was the case or whether there was a problem providing the resources in the Department, such that the Bill was not accorded the priority it deserved.

One cannot deal with legislation in this kind of start-stop manner in which rafts of new amendments are sprung on the Opposition. There were two years in which to consider what changes were necessary and, therefore, they should not have been presented to the Opposition in the past month. At a minimum, this is disrespectful to other Members. I agree with Deputy Olivia Mitchell that we do not know how the legislation hangs together because it has been dealt with in such a piecemeal way. This is very bad practice.

Procrastination, dithering and changing tack are becoming features of Deputy Cullen's Ministry. It is difficult to believe that he has a clear focus in respect of many of his areas of responsibility. For example, he published a Bill to allow for the driver testing and standards authority, which we debated on Second Stage in the House, but announced some time later that he would not proceed to establish the authority but would produce another set of amendments to change the Bill in order to establish a different authority, namely, the road safety authority. One wonders whether the Minister has thought any of these ideas through or whether he is just making them up as he goes along.

A strong commitment was made in the programme for Government to establish a Dublin land use and transport authority, which is obviously needed. A year later, the Minister abandoned this idea but it suddenly dawned on him, in the wake of launching Transport 21, that a transport authority is actually required. Rather than having the proposals for such an authority ready when announcing all the other grand proposals in Dublin Castle, he said that such an authority is needed after the event and referred to the setting up of a team to determine its role and powers. This means that it will be well into next year before the authority is established.

The Minister will forgive us, therefore, for believing that he has no vision of what he wants to do in his Department and that he has not thought through his responsibilities. He is chopping and changing all the time, as is evident in respect of the three major areas to which I have drawn attention. It is not acceptable practice to deal with legislation as he has dealt with this Bill and I regret that. It seems he will repeat this in two other major areas and, therefore, he needs to get his act together.

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