Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

If that is the case, why can the Tánaiste not permit the Bill to wind to an orderly conclusion? To further stipulate, as the Tánaiste sought to do, that next week we would take Committee and Remaining Stages in the same time slot was simply outrageous. The Whips persuaded the Government Chief Whip to depart from that.

What has come over the Tánaiste, who was once a very active and occasionally very inventive Member on this side of the House, to lead him to regard parliamentary scrutiny as an irritant which he must tolerate and to believe that our purpose here is only to rubber stamp legislation? On a previous occasion, he came in to the House with a couple of hundred pages of amendments so the Lord knows what he might do next week on this Bill.

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