Joe O'Toole (Independent)

Nor am I asking the Chair to do so. I am discussing the process.

The Government took a decision last week to go ahead with business when it did not have this information available to it. It still does not have that information, as the Minister of State confirmed to me 20 minutes ago. We now have the odd situation where everyone on this side of the House has access to information which is vital to the process we are undertaking but it is not available to the Minister or his advisers. For God's sake, this is an utter joke.

We can get into the schoolboy debate of whether we discuss this under section 1 or section 2 if that is important to people but the same issues will arise. It is safer to do correctly but in order to do things correctly, it is not accurate to describe the Information Commissioner as a public servant. He was a civil servant of the Government when he worked in the Department of Finance and he has now moved across to another job – he is now a civil servant of the State. If Members take the trouble to look at sections 11 and 12 of the rag we are dealing with today they will see that distinction is made clear for the purposes of covering people in their meetings with the Government. It is not fair to refer to the Information Commissioner as being in some way lesser in making—