Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Perhaps the Minister of State will confirm whether the Bill will be recommenced in the Dáil or whether there is going to be a new Bill with the same information in it, just to go through the procedure ab initio. It seems to me that if there were this much difficulty with the Standing Orders, the best thing to do would have been to reprint the Bill, title it the wildlife (amendment) Bill 2020 - we had hoped it would be 2020 but the year is now 2022 - and bring it back to the House, with whatever examination of amendments was required. I cannot believe it has taken three years in the system to examine a number of amendments made in the Seanad, which no doubt were well debated there. I accept the point about the wording, which is always an issue.

Nevertheless, when a Bill is going through the Dáil and the Opposition brings in an amendment the Government deems to be a good idea, the normal process that happens every day of the week, with which the Ceann Comhairle will be very familiar, is that the Minister comes back with a properly worded amendment, drafted by the OPC. I find it awfully strange that the OPC could not give the Government a new wording for any amendments, the substance of which it accepted but not the wording. I welcome that the Bill will be back before the summer, if that turns out to be the case, but some day I am going to write a dictionary of terms used in the House such as "shortly". Does that mean one, five or ten years, for example?

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