Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The advice is essentially that for a statutory instrument to be put before the Oireachtas there would have to be policies and principles laid down in law in the first instance to allow that to be done. The only mechanism that we could use to allow the Oireachtas ban new substances is primary legislation.

Any declaration or statutory instrument that I would lay before the House would have to have policies and principles underpinning it in primary legislation and therein lies the difficulty.

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