Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy has now gone into his normal mischievous phase. We are doing constructive work. We are not excluding senior public servants. I want to include them in a different way, something which I told the Deputy and which he accepted. One minute he says he accepts my bona fides that this will happen by way of statutory instrument because it is a more effective way of doing it, but the next he wants to make a silly political statement to the effect that I am excluding them all. I am telling him, de facto, on the record of the House, that I am going to include them. Why would he stand truth on its head? There is objective truth.

In regard to this issue, which is lobbying, he can see the practicality of including every Member of the Dáil. Has he run this past his parliamentary colleagues? Every time they go abroad they will not be able to have a discussion with any foreign colleague. When they go to the Council of Europe and somebody talks to them about public policy here, they will be required to register as a lobbyist. That is so impractical and silly that it should not be done. The Deputy knows in his heart that it is not practical to do that, but he is trying to create some sort of political statement that this is not an effective Bill.

I have been trying for ten years to get the register of lobbyists done, and the Deputy's Government resisted it. It voted down a version I presented, and twice voted down a version presented by Deputy Rabbitte. This is a good stab at addressing the issue. It examines best international practice and exhaustive discussions were held with stakeholders in order to develop as good a Bill as we can. It is an effective and good Bill.

I reject the notion that the Deputy is trying to include a list of things by way of exclusion, and that somehow implies this is an ineffective Bill. It is not fair to the volume of work that has been done by Members of the House, the Deputy included, to put that construct on it at this late stage of the debate.

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