Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

We have had a number of weeks during which the Government has used a guillotine to pass legislation. As Deputy Kenny stated, there are nine guillotines on the schedule this week with which we were presented and in addition I understand another four guillotines are on the way in respect of one piece of legislation due to be taken this week. This would bring us to 13 guillotines this week.

The Government is going about ordering the business of the House in a very illogical way. The Ceann Comhairle will recall that last Thursday I objected to the Order of Business on the grounds that the Government had ordered the Bills the wrong way round. I pointed out that there was a guillotine on the first item at 2 p.m. and that I believed the two remaining items would not run their full course and that if we had ordered them the other way round that the full day would have been sufficient to deal with the business. Of course, what happened was exactly that; we ended up with a vote at 2 p.m. on the guillotine on the Criminal Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill with a number of amendments undiscussed and then moved on to the other business.

The House was scheduled to sit until 10 p.m. and it finished at 6 p.m. because, as I predicted, there was not the level of debate that the Government anticipated on the salaries and allowances to be paid to Members of the European Parliament for which it allowed four and three quarter hours on Thursday's business even though it was not going to take that amount of time. The same situation will arise this Thursday where I understand the Government has allocated five hours to all Stages of the Oireachtas (Allowances to Members) and Ministerial and Parliamentary Offices Bill 2009. I do not anticipate that there will be sufficient Deputies offering to require five hours of debate. Even if the Government is trying to order business within the timeframe between now and Friday evening it could do so in a more sensible way than it is doing at present.

I agree with Deputy Kenny in that I do not see any reason the House cannot continue sitting for the rest of the month; if there is legislative business we will deal with it and we will be better dealing with it in a reasoned way, taking the amount of time required rather than having it rushed through in guillotines and having these long sittings that probably do not lend themselves to the type of parliamentary scrutiny that legislation should receive.

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