Eoghan Murphy (Dublin South East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Excellent. I thank the Minister.

I wish make another point already raised by my colleague Deputy Costello concerning companies with fewer than ten employees. I often get lobbied by small companies on the same issue. It has been brought to my attention that large companies might create small subsidiaries just for this purpose, if they think it is important enough. If we can find some sort of language to capture that without putting an unnecessary regulatory or financial burden on small businesses, that would be welcome.

As for the code of conduct, my understanding from the legislation is that the lobbyist must have regard to the code but it is not binding on them. There are no sanctions or penalties for not following the code. If there are no consequences for breaching the code then it will not be adhered to as we would like it to be. We need to ensure that it cannot be ignored. If that is for the next phase it is absolutely acceptable, but we need to find sanctions to ensure integrity.

The HSE is not included in the legislation, but it should be.

My final point concerns off-book meetings, which are not covered in the legislation. A skilled lobbyist will earn his or her money in this area. They will be able to arrange an accidental or coincidental meeting because they know a particular person's habits. Irish society is so small that we know where people will be or we can guess at it. We need to do something to try to capture that as best we can, although it may not be possible. The best lobbyist, however, will be able to arrange chance encounters. Therefore, a duty-to-inform provision is required, so that if a person feels he or she was the subject of lobbying on an issue outside the formal structures of a meeting in a Department or elsewhere, he or she should have an obligation to state that. It may not be a perfect mechanism but we should try to capture that area of lobbying that will continue out of the public eye.

I congratulate the Minister on taking this first step. When I said it was about time, it was not a criticism of the delay; a huge amount has come through in the past three years. It is great that we have seen it come about in this session and at this important time. I welcome the Minister's moves in recent days to protect the integrity of the political system and ensure that work on publicly appointed boards that receive public money is not done because of who one knows but because of what one knows and one's abilities.

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