Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State. What a Bill and what a great deal of work its drafting must have involved. I thank the civil servants who have given us some idea of the amendments that were made to it in the Lower House.

Before I deal with the substantive provisions of the Bill, I wish to protest about the way it has been drafted. The form in which the Bill has come before us makes it a legislative monstrosity. The propensity of the draftsmen to endlessly amend laws, rather than repeal or re-enact them, has always been a major barrier to accessibility. The Bill, the purpose of which is to put in train a fundamental reorganisation of the Central Bank of Ireland, inserts enormous swathes of amendments into an existing Central Bank legislation. The resulting Act will be truly ghastly, unnecessarily difficult and almost impossible to understand. It will require the reader to constantly jump between two different volumes and perform feats of mental gymnastics. I cannot stress too strongly that it does not have to be this way. At best, the Bill is an example of incredibly lazy drafting, while, at worst, it is an attempt to obscure the position and make matters difficult to understand.