Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I point out to the Taoiseach it is not a question of me repeating the arguments about why the statute passed last Friday is of doubtful constitutional validity. We advanced the arguments at the time from these benches. My colleague, Deputy Howlin, set out a number of claims about the legislation that now seem to have been endorsed by various experts. It is not a question of repeating them; they were put at the time and vigorously disputed in this House.

For example, when Deputy Howlin made the point about the Minister abolishing the offence of gross indecency, the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, the former Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform and the Minister for Finance almost leaped across the House at him and said he was wrong and that it now constituted the offence of sexual assault with 14 years' imprisonment as the sentence. They were wrong. The Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform had the good grace to admit since that he was wrong.

There were so many infirmities in the legislation that I would like to ask the Taoiseach if he shares my surprise that the Council of State was not convened to consider whether the Act ought to have been referred to the Supreme Court in the first instance. This was legislation that sought not to criminalise young mothers, as the Taoiseach said, but criminalised young fathers and the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, in another context, deemed it to be a reason for constitutional unsoundness. How was that not picked up by anybody? One might have thought the Council of State would have been convened to examine it.

The Taoiseach said thousands of these files are going through the Attorney General's office. How many of them going through the Attorney General's office relate to constitutional cases? We know there are all those files, like the one for which they are still looking when the Minister, Deputy Martin, was Minister for Health and Children with the associated cost of €1 billion in a refund of charges to old people in nursing homes. The file was last seen in the Minister's office, it went missing and never reached the Attorney General. We have no idea how that happened and so on.

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