Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I am also greatly disappointed with what we are being asked to vote on tonight. It is hard to believe that we are an island nation, because it would have been thought that this would have been one of the things we would have got right. It was not that long ago that we had a debate here on the loss of marine helicopter R116. That report was clear about its intention. It set out not to apportion blame, but to learn lessons and to save lives in future. Every investigation should be about that.

Much of this context predates the Minister's time. That is why there was a greater expectation that he would do things differently. This legislation started out with an EU directive in 2009, which we were meant to transpose by 2011. We were to have investigations that were independent. It is not a big ask for them to be genuinely independent. In 2015, the European Commission sought clarity. We had the audacity to challenge that in 2016, and to more or less say that we were not infringing in this regard. The European Commission argued that the make-up of the board did not constitute it being independent.

Many things missing from this legislation have been identified in those two reports. It is astonishing that reports which do chart the way have not been made available. What was the point of compiling those reports if we are not going to learn from the information contained in them? The Minister needs to tell us whether the report is going to be published at the end of the month. What would preclude it from being published? We should be looking at best international practice in the context of this legislation, but that is not what we are getting. We are getting a tick-box approach. We are just about in compliance, in theory, but we must be in compliance in practice, because that will make the difference in respect of learning lessons when accidents happen and in preventing them from happening in future.

We do regulation poorly. We do it in a fragmented and disjointed way. We think we save money by not having good regulatory organisations in place. In fact, we end up paying a price in the end. In this case, it may well be seafarers who end up paying the price. Often, though, we end up paying the price, in the context of compensation and things like that, because we have not done regulation well. I do not know when the penny will drop in this respect. It is not a situation unique to this aspect or this legislation. It is a general feature of how we do things. We must start learning lessons, take the bull by the horns and do this right. We should do this once and do it right. I would have thought that is what we would have been aiming to do here. It is disappointing that what we are doing instead is pushing into the future something that could be done now.

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