Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Any penalty imposed by a court of law is part of a judicial function. The administration of justice in criminal matters is constitutionally confined to the courts and the selection of a penalty following conviction is an integral part of the judicial function. I was disappointed this got through because if one goes back to Cox v. Ireland in 1992, it was a case of game over, out to hell with it and it should not have been brought in.

I welcome some of the other measures in the Bill. I do not want to get caught up in some of them. Section 9 is a sensible provision. For anyone who gets out of bed and goes to work, that is rehabilitative in itself. This is why I want community employment, CE, schemes to be reviewed in order to allow people to avail of this. It is very important to people who have nothing else to go to. The very fact that they go to CE schemes and do their 19 hours is very important in rural parts of the country, and there are many people who do that.

What I am really concerned about is the pension situation. My colleagues, Deputies Brady and O'Dea, and I have introduced Bills on this. None of us claims to have the monopoly of wisdom or virtue, but we had to cry stop to an untrammelled gallop to the headlands to get out of defined benefit schemes. These schemes were healthy from a financial perspective and an employer's perspective. Of course, at the end of the day, many of them cleverly rushed to the headlands so they could distribute dividends to their shareholders. That is what much of this was about. The unfortunate people left behind were the contributors. We had to cry stop. A bit like the late John Healy, we were out crying stop well in advance. It took a bit of convincing, and I know the officials in the Department of Social Protection might have been quite reluctant. The people in the Office of the Ombudsman and the Financial Regulator would be doubly reluctant-----

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