Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

That period of time from 1821 to 1861 has already been referred to. It hits all of us. We are talking about Daniel O'Connell and emancipation during this period of time right up to the Famine. It is hard to look at this and realise that we are still dealing with famine in the 21st century.

I will come back to the body of this quickly. I will not speak for long on it but there is a feeling of awful frustration that we learn so little. While this is a technical Bill, with statutes and regulations that we do not need anymore and that are obsolete, and it is a welcome piece of work, it brings up so many memories from a particular time and yet we are doing the exact same thing all over again. We are doing it in Palestine and the Sudan. We are allowing it to happen everywhere. I will not use my voice on that but I could not but say it.

It is important when we have law that it is clear and we should know where we stand with the law, both the ordinary person and business people, as rights-based reason and to save money. This type of reform has been going on since 2005. I thank the Law Reform Commission and the sub-committee that has worked on this for their good work on what is redundant legislation.

We are told there will be four main policy-related outcomes as a result of this. The first relates to the rule of law. In a state that follows the rule of law principle, citizens and businesses should know the law that regulates them and whether that law is in force. I will come back to that in a minute in relation to other modern legislation that has never been commenced. However, we should know whether the law is in force and the work of the Law Reform Commission will identify definitively what pre-1922 secondary legislation still applies.

The second is reduced compliance costs. The work will reduce compliance costs for businesses, public servants and regulatory bodies who must spend time and more money finding the up-to-date picture of legislation. From a previous life, I am fully aware of how difficult that is and how costly it becomes.

Rights and obligations imposed by law should be easy to find. It is very basic. I refer to consolidation of legislation and the digital first policy. I repeat rights and obligations imposed by law should be easy to find. We are going through this process to ensure that and that is welcome. We are living in the 21st century where international law is being reduced to terrible terms such as "rules-based order". We do not know whose rules or what rules. It is the rules of whoever is in power at the time as opposed to international law based on rights - rights that should be easy to find and to implement. None of that is happening, of course, in relation to international law and what Israel blatantly is getting away with.

We had the OECD report on this in 2010. It pointed out that Ireland has a long-standing issue of needing to simplify a complex stock of legislation. All this has been said and I merely wanted to highlight that and the clarity of the work from the Library and Research Service.

My colleague, Thomas Pringle, who unfortunately is not a Member of this Dáil, did a huge amount of work in the previous Dáil asking questions on what legislation had not been implemented or what number of reviews had not been carried out. I will not be here but I will listen to the Minister of State's answer. Could we get some clarification? Is there a body of work being done by the Law Reform Commission or any other body on legislation that has never been implemented or has been implemented only in part? That is merely a sample of the answers Thomas Pringle, when he was a Deputy, went to the trouble to seek. Every Department had to answer. The former Deputy limited his question to ten years and the answers that came back showed an absence of data on that and an absence of a forum to look at that.

We should know within a reasonable time what legislation has not been commenced and why it has not been commenced. Later tonight we will look at Údarás na Gaeltachta and Acht na dTeangacha Oifigiúla will come up in the debate. It is only a few years since the Act was passed and some of the sections are still to be implemented. How many pieces of legislation that have been on our books for 10 or 20 years have not been fully commenced, let alone implemented? Then there are the reviews that should be taking place, sometimes as a matter of course and other times as it is written into the legislation, such as in the case of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act that we passed back in 2017. Built into that was an obligation to review that law to see if it was effective. I note that the Minister for Justice announced this week that it was to be published yesterday or the day before that, five years after the obligation should have been complied with. If I know that just from my interest in that legislation, how many other pieces of legislation are in the same position? If the Minister of State would clarify that, I would appreciate it.

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