James Browne (Wexford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

A significant amount of work has gone into this legislation. I want to thank my officials, including the team working on it at the moment and the previous members of the team. An extraordinary amount of work has gone into what is an extremely complex legislation which not only regulates a massive industry that has largely gone unregulated, but deals with the public health perspective and ensures the relevant sections are there to protect the public and design the legislation in such a way as to ensure there is strong primary legislation with flexibility for the regulatory authority to make recommendations to the Minister and change regulations as the industry moves and changes in terms of how it may target people. It is a huge piece of legislation and I want to thank all the officials in the Department of Justice.

I also want to thank the former and current Attorneys General, Paul Gallagher and Rossa Fanning, the teams in the Office of Parliamentary Counsel and the advisory council for their extraordinary work. I want to mention the former Minister of State, Deputy David Stanton, who did a huge amount of foundational work on this legislation, for which he gets very little credit on days like today. I want to mention Deputy Stanton and his team as I worked with him at the time.

I want to mention the three Senators who championed this legislation from the very start, namely, Senators Shane Cassells, Mark Wall and Joe O'Reilly. They kept this legislation in focus in their parties. I thank the Ceann Comhairle for guiding this legislation.

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