Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will speak to the amendments briefly. The spirit of all three amendments is the same, but I support amendment No. 6 in particular. It reads: "Before prescribing regulations made under this section, the Minister shall notify and lay before each House of the Oireachtas". This is the most basic requirement, given the extraordinary powers the Dáil seems intent on giving the Minister.

Turning to the regulations that the Minister will be allowed to introduce, the proposed section 38S starts on page 24 of the Bill and continues to page 28 and gives the Minister the most extraordinary range of powers without any scrutiny. The updated submission from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, ICCL, tells us that he has had this power to make regulations restricting rights under emergency legislation without Oireachtas scrutiny since March 2020. That is not acceptable. The ICCL believes that the process for making these regulations could be improved significantly and has called for a mandatory consultation with the Minister for Justice and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission before regulations are made. The amendments call for scrutiny by the Dáil.

Restrictions on liberty must be targeted and proportionate and what they are trying to achieve must be set out clearly. That last has never happened in this Dáil since the pandemic. We all worked with the Government in the beginning, and here we are nearly two years into the pandemic yet we have not even begun to put a human rights framework on the restrictions that we are introducing. It is in this context that I am supporting the amendments. While I have made it clear that I am not supporting the Bill, the amendments seek to bring some level of scrutiny to the extraordinary powers that the Oireachtas is giving the Minister without any analysis or human rights assessment of those powers or any analysis of the powers he has had to date.

As some of my colleagues have said, we are left in a position of trying to explain to people on the ground what we have passed in the Dáil. We learn from press releases and announcements on the plinth outside and various programmes. That manner of communicating, along with the spin that has dominated the message from the transitional Government and this Government since day one, has undermined confidence in the political system, with appalling consequences for the future. Losing more trust in the political system and in politicians is a warning for the future. The Minister has a chance now to show his bona fides and accept these amendments and accept, at least in theory, that his regulations must be scrutinised by the Dáil.

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