Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I put it to Sinn Féin that if there is a good argument for incorporating sentencing changes into this Bill, we can all take those points on board, learn from them and I am sure we would be open to supporting them. However, that is entirely different to going behind the scenes and horse trading in advance of this session. If Sinn Féin genuinely wants to have the presidents of the two courts back on the commission, but objects to the Attorney General's inclusion, it should support Deputy Wallace's amendment, which provides for that composition. For us, the lay versus legal issue was never decisive. What is at stake here is the independence of the appointment of the Judiciary from the political process but the Government's reinstatement of the Attorney General has actually made the situation worse. It is not true to say, as the Minister claimed earlier, that the knowledge of the Attorney General is being discounted. It is not being discounted but is being listened to in the arena where it should be listened to, that is, as with other jurisdictions with a similar system, as a valued adviser to the Government. If the Attorney General is present in the room when the commission is deliberating and is privy to all of the thought processes involved there and then goes and sits in on the second stage of the process and can tell tales to Government, so to speak, on the earlier thought processes, how is that lessening political interference? As the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, has pointed out, the Attorney General is a political appointee, which we all know. Not only that, matters are made worse by the fact that the Government is seeking to provide that the Minister can reappoint the lay members on the commission. Commission members will know that the Attorney General can go back and tell the Minister about the commission's deliberations, which will mitigate against the independence of the lay members because they will know that they could be reported back to the Minister.

This is heartbreaking, given the amount of work that has gone into this legislation. It is bad law and I echo Deputy Barrett's point that at this, the 11th hour, we should call a halt to this because it is all over the shop in terms of different amendments and so forth. We are going to seriously regret what has been done here, particularly as the Judiciary has generally served us well. What started out as a project to make a process better will end up making it much worse. It is actually scary.

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