Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Regarding legislative development generally, of course we need a review procedure. I am not sure this Bill is the place to bring that in. We have a series of difficulties with our legislation, which make much of it generally impenetrable to people who need to access it and who do not have access to lawyers. It is even difficult for lawyers to read our legislation because of our dependence on textual and non-textual amendments and the way that we stick things into miscellaneous provisions Bills which amend completely different Acts. It is very hard for anybody to know what the law is on a given subject at any time.

The Law Reform Commission has put great effort into revised and annotated Acts and that project has gone some way in this regard. We have also had the statute law revision project, which has got rid of many Acts which were no longer relevant. A major textual body of work remains to be done on how we draft legislation, present it and make it accessible to people. The review of legislation needs to be part of that.

Instead of the House accepting the amendment which, while appropriately highlighting the issue, will not solve it, could the Law Reform Commission be asked to develop a system through which appropriate reviews could be carried out? Perhaps that could be linked to the other issues of presentation to which I refer. For example, the Civil Partnership Act and Certain Rights and Obligations of Cohabitants Act 2010, or the Children and Family Relationships Act 2015, which succeeded and fixed the civil partnership Act in many ways, are extensive items of legislation that just refer to other legislation such as that relating to pensions, employment and adoption, and references to "child" are put into them. That has happened again and again and legislators have raised for many decades the way in which we present legislation. Nevertheless, it is not a body of work for the Bill before us but for the Law Reform Commission and the Department of Justice more generally. It needs to be done because it is making it difficult to access the law and to know what it is at any given time, but I am not sure that this legislation is the place for it.

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