Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State. I have to say that this is a shoddy, tardy and entirely unacceptable way of doing business. Only last week, I was commenting that it looked like we were going to get through a Dáil term without having the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Minister lobbing in detailed, technical and complicated amendments to existing legislation at the tail end of an unrelated piece of legislation in a manner which makes it virtually impossible for those of us on this side of the House to do our job. I want to make it very clear that I am not in any way criticising the hard-working officials in the Department who, at very short notice, came in and gave us a very detailed, hour-long briefing on these 24 pages of amendments. In fact, most of them are not amendments and most would actually be sections of the Bill. There are 35 amendments in all.

I made the comment only half in jest to one of the officials, after she very expertly went through the detail of the amendments to the Foreshore Act and the Maritime Area Planning Act, that my head hurt. What the Minister of State is asking us to do, following an hour-long briefing and a 90-minute discussion today, which is not even on the substantive issues of the Bill, is to try to do what we would ordinarily do with complex legislation over a period of weeks or even months. This is not about being for or against what is in the legislation. What really frustrates me when we get to this point in the term is that, very often, what is being brought forward is eminently sensible. However, if we, as legislators, are to do our job properly, we have to be given time to understand, to scrutinise and to potentially highlight errors. Very often, the hard-working officials in the Department are asked to work to impossible deadlines and errors are made. It is the system that is at fault, not the individual drafter of the legislation. What happens when we rush legislation and errors are made? We get another set of non-consequential amendments at the end of the following term, and another at the end of the following term, and so the process repeats.

I am not supporting this motion. I want to make it very clear that this does not mean that when we have time to parse and understand these amendments, and when they come in front of the committee - one would expect possibly next week - that I will be opposing the substance of the amendments. On the basis of some of the information we have got today, they have some merit. However, in addition to being entirely dissatisfied with the process, I am not convinced that all of these need to be introduced in this way. As a result, here we are again, with an absolute mess; not one of the Minister of State’s making or that of the hard-working officials, but we are left with a pig in a poke.

Specifically with regard to the clusters of amendments, the level of technical detail in the changes to the Foreshore Act and the Maritime Area Planning Act is significant. I am not the smartest person in the world but I do not consider myself that stupid either. Having listened to the official very carefully, we had to ask her if she would then send us her notes because we are going to need to reread those a second or third time, we are going to have to consult with some experts who are key to our understanding of this – those in the planning community, the offshore wind community and the local government community - and in an accelerated period, try to work out if this is all okay. I want to see, in particular, the first tranche of offshore wind projects developed as fast as possible but I want them to be got right. The Minister of State and I both share a passionate interest in ensuring we do not sacrifice, for example, marine biodiversity in the rush to get offshore wind. How in God’s name can we make sure we get that fix right if we are not given the time to adequately assess and understand the legislation, including what could be eminently sensible changes in front of us? We have not been given that time.

I engaged in a small and silent chuckle when we were told in the context of the amendments to the Lough Corrib Navigation Act, that, in fact, this was restoring powers that were accidentally removed from the trust that oversees Lough Corrib in the 2009 legislation. There is a bit of me that, if I have some time over the weekend and I cannot get to bed at night, wants to go back and look at Committee Stage of that legislation to see if it was rushed and if that was one of the reasons why that accident happened. Maybe it was, maybe it was not. Again, it does not seem to me unreasonable at all that this proposition is made but there is limited time to consider it.

Obviously, the proposed amendment with regard to ensuring that a councillor who acts in substitution for another elected member who is on maternity leave and so on has the full functions and responsibilities of the member they are substituting for is eminently sensible. I have no difficulty with that; it is one of the least technical and easiest to understand amendments in front of us. However, while this is not a criticism of the officials, we only had an hour to go through these 24 pages of legislation and, in fact, some of the most technical stuff was the changes in regard to the Local Government Act and the Valuation Act. By that stage, I have to say that my head did not just hurt but my eyes and ears were bleeding from just trying to get my head around the complexity of it. I do not envy the officials who have to deal with this daily. There are parts of those amendments that I just do not understand at this stage, and we only had one minute for questions at the end of our briefing. The officials very gracefully answered the questions as asked, but we need more time.

What is really unfortunate about this is that the Historic and Archaeological Heritage Bill is very important. Obviously, we have amendments. My colleague, Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh, has led for us on that Bill. I will be speaking to his amendments in committee tomorrow. Deputy Cian O'Callaghan and others have a keen interest in this matter. Instead of us ending the term by agreeing really important and historic legislation, whatever the final outcome of the amendments that we will table, which the Minister of State will tell us are great but which he will likely be instructed to ignore, we will end up involved in a row. I do not want to be here arguing about very important legislation, but what is happening is simply not acceptable. Given the fact that the committee's legislative agenda over the past couple of months has been significantly lighter than would ordinarily be the case, I do not understand why this could not have been done in a different way.

We were not notified of the non-consequential amendments. Nobody from the Department had the courtesy to email the committee a week ago to say they were giving us a heads-up on the 24 pages containing 35 amendments, and to ask if we would like a briefing. We could have had a detailed two-hour briefing last week to go through all of this. Instead, it was down to committee members going through the amendments on Monday after they had been published, and on Tuesday requesting the briefing. At the last minute, the officials are dragged from very important business they have to do elsewhere, our committee secretariat has to organise it and we have to slice an hour out of our day. That is not a good way to do business. I am asking, first, that the Minister does not do this again, but if he is going to do it, give the committee notice, give officials time to organise briefings, and at least allow us to have some level of scrutiny. Rushed legislation leads to bad legislation, which leads to unintended consequences. Those of us on this side of the House do not want to be a party to that.

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