Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I believe the way this is being done is very wrong. Very rarely in my time in the House, other than with finance and consolidation Bills, have I seen a Bill this large being published. It is a very large Bill, containing 172 sections and an amount of detail. The Minister published it last Friday within the Dáil. That goes against all the protocols we were assured we would have about Dáil debates. There are meant to be two weeks between Second Stage and Committee Stage to allow people prepare amendments. There are also meant to be two weeks between the Committee and the Report Stage. I understand the Minister intends to throw all this aside for no reason. If the Minister could not get this in on time, the only thing she could do with the timescales is to push them all back.

As we, who are experienced in putting legislation through, know, rushed legislation, particularly complex legislation, tends to be very bad legislation. So-called consensus-driven legislation - let us not look at it and examine it for unintended consequences - tends even in the simplest of cases to lead to mistakes being made. My experience of doing Bills was that as I went through each section in detail and analysed a Bill in detail, in many cases the drafters came back or I went to the drafters and asked if they were absolutely sure certain things were correct. As the Minister knows, ministerial amendments arising from drafting errors are many in most Bills.

I was looking at a much smaller Bill, the Animal Health and Welfare Bill, which ran to approximately 40 sections. It took more than a year going through the two Houses. In fairness, to the Minister's colleague, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, he went through that Bill in a very meticulous manner. He engaged with the Opposition in a very thorough manner. We got excellent briefings. He accepted Opposition amendments. That was an uncontentious Bill. Nobody in the Dáil is against the principle of animal health and welfare. However, when we started looking at the small print, the Minister accepted there were many amendments to be made.

After he had gone through an exhaustive process on Committee Stage, the Minister postponed Report Stage because more amendments were being drafted. In fairness, on Report Stage he came back with many amendments that improved the Bill. He also took on board all the reasonable proposals put by the Opposition. As the Minister, Deputy Fitzgerald, knows when dealing with a Bill, in many cases an Opposition Member puts forward a thesis and the Minister is able to explain why that thesis does not stand up, perhaps because it is covered in some other section of the Bill. Most people in opposition accept that. However, where the Opposition made a good case, the Minister, Deputy Coveney, accepted it.

In fact, I welcome the Bill wholeheartedly because there is a need for reform. However, I argue that it is highly unlikely that there are not drafting errors and issues of unintended consequences within the Bill. Why would this Bill, which is immensely complicated, be so different from all the other Bills that come into this House? What is so magic about the way this one was drafted that it does not need proper parliamentary scrutiny? What is the rush?

I remember making a mistake in my early time as a Minister in rushing one small part of additions to legislation. It ended up costing me more grief than all the legislation I had done both as a Minister of State and as a Minister subsequently.

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