Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

In the spirit of Deputy Fitzmaurice, I will not delay the House too much either. I am not going to go back over everything that was addressed last night by the Minister when he outlined the Bill and his hopes for it. I thank all the Members on behalf of the Minister and the Department for their contributions. We appreciate the support offered for the Bill. Most speakers supported the Bill or certainly most of it. We understand it is quite technical in nature and it has much detail. It is also very important that we get this Bill right legally. It will take some time to work through that.

The Minister did stress last night that he hoped to bring this Bill through as fast as possible but recognising as well that it has to be given proper scrutiny. That is guaranteed. As some of the speakers referred to last night, we all agree this has to be done but we still have to make sure that we get it right. Every effort will be made to do that. We will work through ways of teasing through the detail of the Bill on Committee Stage and in other informal ways. We will also work on amendments that Deputies might have, in addition to our own that the Minister will want to bring through on Committee Stage.

We will work with Members on that and try to explore different way to do our business faster because we all want to get this done as fast as possible. The main provisions in the Bill focus on the main priorities. People will, naturally, have a long list of other stuff that they will want to add in and we will be able to judge that better on Committee Stage as to how fast we can do that or what aspects we might have to come back to. There is certainly a list of different issues in respect of the behaviour of landlords that can be added at a later stage if needs be. We can work on that too.

I again thank all the Members for their contributions, both last night and today, and for their time. It is a Bill that many of us have been anticipating for a while and it is great that we finally have it in the House and that we are getting though Second Stage. I look forward to working with all of the Members on Committee Stage.

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