James Bannon (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)

I welcome this Bill, which is a few decades late in a historic and practical sense. I accept the need to take legislative action to bring the ownership of land, and everything that pertains to it, up to date. I pay tribute to the invaluable work of the Law Reform Commission in preparing the Bill and clearing the cobwebs that surround much land registry and conveyancing legislation. As a farmer, I am familiar with the legal problems associated with the ownership of small portions of land. I am annoyed and concerned about the long delays encountered during the conveyancing process. I hope this legislation will clear up the uncertainty in this area.

One of the greatest barriers to the full take-up by citizens of their rights is the use of expert or archaic language. The proposal in this Bill to remove this obstacle is welcome. The exclusive language used by many professions is designed to exclude lay people and to mystify relatively simple processes. As Mrs. Justice Laffoy pointed out, it is crucial that we get rid of the historical and irrelevant baggage which engulfs the day-to-day work of conveyancers so they can concentrate on what is important. I hope that will lead to more efficient and cost-effective practice.

The land law and conveyancing law code consists of a complex mixture of statutory provisions, common law and equity. It can be unnecessarily complicated and is sometimes difficult to apply to modern conditions. Land law, broadly speaking, deals with the multiple types of ownership of land and the rights pertaining to each of them. Conveyancing law is concerned with the transfer and disposal of land and the rights pertaining to it. I welcome this Bill because it provides for the repeal, in whole or in part, of approximately 150 pre-1922 statutes, some of which go back to the 11th and 12th centuries and for their replacement, where appropriate, with statutory provisions which are more suited to 21st century circumstances. The Bill also repeals certain provisions in Acts of the Oireachtas which will no longer be required following its enactment.

The average waiting time for the completion of certain land registry transactions is well over a year in some parts of the State, which is untenable. These delays result from staff shortages and the huge increase in land and property dealings in recent years. The Government did not meet these new challenges by increasing staffing levels in the Land Registry. As a result, people have had to wait for considerable periods of time. Many sales collapsed as a result of the long delays in the Land Registry. At the end of January of this year, the total number of current dealings in the Property Registration Authority, which replaced the old Land Registry and Registry of Deeds Office last November, was 175,790. I remind the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform that his Department is responsible for the failure to increase staffing levels over the past five years. The Minister did not acknowledge such problems in his speech.

The average waiting time for each county is calculated by dividing the number of dealings in the county by the average number of dealings completed there each month in 2006. My home county of Longford has one of the most advanced land registration systems in the country. It was to the fore in participating in the Irish Spatial Data Infrastructure project. As Deputies are aware, Land Registry delays are one of the biggest problems we face on a daily basis. I witnessed such difficulties on several occasions when I was a Member of the Seanad. Such delays impact adversely on our beleaguered farming community, which faces undue delays in selling sites or land. They are particularly annoying for elderly people who want to sell their land as quickly as possible. I hope this problem will be rectified.

There are a number of major faults with the conveyancing process — it is too complex, for example, and it lacks transparency across processes and groups. Lenders do not provide any universal standard documentation. The system is overly paper-based. It inherited its propensity for delays from old legislation, as I have said. Under the current conveyancing process, information is spread over wide groups. There is no uniform or standard usage of information technology. When I visited the Land Registry offices in recent months, I noticed that the system has improved to some extent. While the legislation in this field is complex and outdated, the legislation before the House proposes to address that. The conservative nature of the culture and tradition in this sector means that delays are easily accepted.

Some of our land ownership and transaction laws and practices are based on the feudal notion of land tenure. This Bill abolishes the surviving traces of feudal tenure, which was the system under which the king was lord of all land and granted land to his lords in return for military and other services. While such practices are no longer found in this country, we all remember the landlords who granted portions of land to tenants etc. in a manner that complicated matters for many farmers throughout the country. That landlords used to give tenants a field here and a field there, often in separate townlands, but not the fields in between, continues to cause friction.

Some amending legislation has been brought forward but more is required to facilitate those who wish to have their portions of land in close proximity to where they live.

The Bill also abolishes various common law rules resulting from court decisions and conveyancing practices. The abolition of the feudal system will lead to the repeal of 130 pre-1922 statutes without amendment. It will ensure that in future landowners will own their land in the normal sense of the word. This is to be welcomed as a system of feudalism has no place in the modern world. People want ownership of land for which they may have paid a high price and they want to have clear title to what they have paid for.

Our now rapidly fading economic growth was not matched by modernisation or improvement of the processes of Government to business and Government to citizen. I am pleased that members of the Government parties will table amendments to this Bill as they are not happy with it. It is to be hoped that this Bill, with the necessary amendments, will bring the system to an acceptable 21st century level of standards. I wait with bated breath for the amendments from the Government side. I have no doubt there will be plenty of amendments from this side of the House.

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