Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour)

It is very important. I support that the level of information required should be published. Having the detail of the information is important so that people are fully informed. It may be on the company website but anybody who knows me will know I am not very much into technological material. However, this is important for the generations who are, who will be able to follow companies, particularly those that purchase their own shares on a stock exchange outside the State. That is the basic point and it is important. It will obviously provide very detailed and focused information. Very often companies complain that the Minister is imposing further bureaucracy and administrative burdens on them. The Minister is proposing to amend that requirement to publish the price of shares purchased and to provide an alternative method that would require companies to publish only the highest and the lowest prices paid. Under this amendment one does not have to publish the time of each purchase in order to avoid the necessity for a lengthy list of times and to restrict requirement to the date of the purchase only. Those are laudable objectives because there is no point in strangling legislation at birth, so to speak. An issue we frequently discuss in this House is loading legislation with bureaucracy, which is self-defeating in the long term. This measure brings some common sense to the issue, which I applaud. The Minister and his officials are right to do this in this area and I will wholeheartedly support the amendment.

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