Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Rural Independent Group for putting forward this motion. It seeks to achieve exactly what our amendment to the Bill last week sought to do, namely, remove the emergency power being given to the Minister to make regulations which have not been properly debated or scrutinised in this House penal offences. It is a very wide-ranging and draconian power which we do not believe the Minister should have.

This is not just about regulations in pubs. It is about whether we should give powers to a Minister and, in particular, a Government which has, frankly, made a mess of communicating public health guidelines and is losing the faith of the public in terms of the rationale, consistency, purpose and effectiveness of their public health strategy. It is also about an Opposition that is, for the most part, also inconsistent and, frankly, confusing in the position it is taking.

Last Thursday, we proposed an amendment to the Government's legislation. I scratched my head the next day when I saw Deputies from Sinn Féin, the Labour Party and the Social Democrats who voted with the Government jumping up and down decrying the very powers they had given the Minister as bonkers when they voted to give him these powers. It is quite extraordinary and it is still not clear to me which way they will vote on the motion. What is at stake are very important civil liberties issues.

People who have been listening to the Special Committee on Covid-19 Response should listen to what the Free Legal Advice Centres, FLAC, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, and the Law Society have said about their concerns about the inability of the Government to communicate its public health messages and the blurring of the lines between what is a legal offence and what are public health guidelines and concerns. The ICCL opposed the criminal sanctions with regard to movement in the early phases of the pandemic and was worried about the significant criminal sanctions attached to ongoing regulations and the right to protest, the lack of clarity around policing of those protests, the obligations on organisers, the hooding of detainees and the unnecessary and inappropriate pub regulations and their proportionality. One can go down through the list. There is a real problem.

Members of the public have shown themselves to be ahead of the Government when it comes to adhering to public health guidelines when they understand the rationale behind them. The idea that it is okay to open the pubs, but that we may not be able to have a sister over to a house and to do so might be made a criminal offence does not make sense to people.

When the State puts people into overcrowded housing conditions, direct provision centres and so on it is not committing an offence whereas having more than six people in one's house might be. It makes no sense. We do not believe that Minister should have powers to, essentially, make things penal offences on a whim. We should explain the rationale behind regulations, educate the public and bring them with us and listen to them to determine what is necessary in order to effectively combat this virus, rather than giving draconian powers to the Minister for Health.

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