Barry Ward (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this Bill. The statute law revision project is hugely valuable which has been going on for more than 20 years. When I worked as legal adviser to Enda Kenny TD, as he was then, when he was leader of Fine Gael in opposition, the first of these Bills, the Statute Law Revision (Pre-1922) Bill 2004, which became the Act of 2005, was being dealt with and I had more time to peruse the 18th century and older legislation that were being deleted or expunged by that legislation. It is a hugely important project. To say it is an arduous task which those involved face is an understatement. I understand that for this Bill 40,000 secondary instruments were reviewed to ascertain whether they were obsolete and to be replaced and, of those, 3,367 will be repealed in the Bill. It is an enormous volume of material to go through but it is obviously a very valuable and important process.

A perusal of the Bill reveals some of the very interesting proclamations that are being dealt with. One is the proclamation for apprehending the persons who posted an illegal notice at Tubber, near Dunlavin, County Wicklow, warning Thomas Holland to give up certain lands on 4 April 1834. I do not know whether Thomas did that or not but it is interesting that we should do away with that legislative instrument at this stage. There was another proclamation for apprehending the 16 men who walked into the Royal Canal Company’s store yard at the Royal Canal Harbour in the parish of St. Michael’s, County Dublin, and broke several barrels belonging to Mr. Guinness, brewer, in 1837. There is a proclamation for apprehending the persons who set fire to a large stack of flax belonging to James Caldwell of Tamnavetton, parish of Kilmore, County Armagh in 1837, and an order setting the close time for salmon in the Skibbereen District in 1856. There is a proclamation made in 1825 appointing 6 January 1826 as the day from which the silver and gold coins of Great Britain may pass current and circulate in Ireland in 1825 and an order requiring all out-pensioners and registered men of Chelsea Hospital and Kilmainham Hospital to present for a fitness examination in December 1821. There is such a wide variety of material covered by this, it is extraordinary.

This is the culmination of a project that has gone through iterations in the 2007 Act and those of 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2016. An enormous amount of work had to be done. Another item that drew my attention was reference No. 138 in the appendix, which is the order convening a meeting for carrying the Lighting of Towns (Ireland) Act 1828 into force in the town of Kingstown. Another that caught my attention is No. 1209 in the appendix, relating to Monkstown and dating from 9 August 1836. It is the proclamation for apprehending the persons who broke into the watch house and vault in the churchyard of the Union of Monkstown in the district of Dublin Metropolis, and forced the lid off a coffin and left the body exposed in an offensive manner. One may cast back to what Monkstown was like in 1836. It is absolutely extraordinary. Most of what we now know as Monkstown in Dublin was not even built at that time. The railway, which was not built until 1837, absolutely transformed that area of Dublin as the first commuter railway in the world, the Dublin to Kingstown railway as it was known, from what is now Pearse Station out to Dún Laoghaire. It changed the whole topography of that area because it was built across the sands at Sandymount and Blackrock and created a lagoon inside the track and created an entirely different coastline. Now in Blackrock you can see sea cliffs in the park that, prior to 1837, were where the waves would have crashed up from Dublin Bay. At that time, Monkstown was very much a rural area occupied by people in isolated houses, many of them large houses that were owned by merchants who worked in Dublin and had them as their country residences. Those were lands that were given to the monks of St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin, from which we get Abbey Street and St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin. They were granted those lands and they occupied an enormous area that went as far as Bullock Harbour near Dalkey, where they built, for example, Bullock Harbour. Imagine how different that landscape would have been at the time this proclamation was made in 1836 compared with what we know today in the suburban area that is Monkstown. Many of the buildings that were there remain. Slightly later was the Church of Ireland church that was built at the junction in the centre of Monkstown village. It is a building that many will know. It is a particularly beautiful building and one which people may visit. It is worth mentioning that the schoolhouse attached to it was recently lovingly and extensively refurbished by the parish there. Canon Roy Byrne, the rector, deserves enormous credit for the work that was done there to restore it to what it had been. It was opened recently. It deserves note that the landscape has changed so significantly.

This is an enormous body of work that had to be done. In 100 years' time, a similar Bill may have to be brought before these Houses to carry out a similar cleaning exercise on obsolete legislation. I do not know if that will be necessary but I repeatedly make a twofold point in these Houses when legislation is going through, particularly amending legislation. First, it is largely illegible for anyone who does not have the corpus of legislation which precedes it. If a Bill amends three or four other pieces of legislation and a section refers to amending, say, section 9 of the principal Act and then you are told the principal Act in subsection 2 is amended in paragraph (a) by replacing “and” with “or”, nobody knows what that means without also getting the principal Act that is being amended, and that Act itself may have also been amended elsewhere. This is a project that requires an awful lot of man hours.

Reference has been made to those working on this project within the Office of the Attorney General and particularly in the Law Reform Commission, which does fantastic work. Credit is due to the Law Reform Commission. As a State agency, it delivers time and time again on what it says it will do. It delivers reports that bring common-sense solutions to these Houses and are all too often ignored. They have to do that work because it has not been done on an ongoing basis. In respect of amending legislation, it would make much more sense to take the principal Act that is being amended, repeal it and restate it in the amending Act, so that it is restated with all of the changes that have been made. It may be an awkward job on an ongoing basis for those who are writing the legislation but it would negate the necessity for projects like this to be done 50 or 100 years from now. We would be creating consolidated legislation, essentially, when we sought to amend an older piece of legislation. Sometimes the legislation is not that old.

In the area of road traffic legislation, for example, the laws have been amended dozens of times, literally. The Road Traffic (Amendment) Act 2010 is very difficult to read without putting together a series of other Acts that were passed over the preceding 40 years, primarily since the principal Act of 1961. There are any number of examples of this. Taxes consolidation was done in the 1990s and served us very well at that stage. It was an enormous project to consolidate all the taxation legislation into one Act in 1997, which has since been amended time and time again. When we come to the budget later this year, and we are passing the Finance Act, the Appropriations Act, the Social Welfare Act and all those other pieces of legislation, it would be much more sensible to take the Act that is being amended or even the Acts that are being amended and, instead of leaving them there and changing them with a later document that amends them, bring them all together, repeal the old ones and pass a new piece of legislation which clearly states what it actually intends to do. That would save future generations from sitting down for a great many hours and going through tens of thousands of documents to see whether they are obsolete. It would also make that legislation much more legible to ordinary citizens. If a person wanted to know what the law actually says, they could take down the Act and it would be very clear from reading it, insofar as any Act is clear. It would be easy to read that Act to see what it actually says. We do not do that and I have never been given a convincing reason as to why we do not. It would be in service of the populace of Ireland to make those laws more accessible to them and more easily read.

We could spend all day picking out interesting items that are being expunged through this legislation. Great credit is due to those who have done this work, who have spent the time not just identifying items that should be undone or repealed but also checking there is not a consequence further down the line, subsequent legislation that relies on them or whatever the case may be. It gives an enormous advantage to us as lawmakers but also to those working with law, whether in the courts or other areas of the law, to be able to say with some certainty whether an instrument has been repealed or not. It is the legacy of the statute law revision group that we will have that. This Bill is just the latest iteration of that. Congratulations to them. I thank them for their work and look forward to the passage of the legislation into law.

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