Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

Amendments to any legislation are intended to be read in conjunction with the remaining provisions of the original Act. This Act does not operate in isolation. Hence, it seems impractical to follow the course advocated by the Senator and gender-proof this Bill without gender-proofing the original 1960 Act. The Office of the Parliamentary Counsel has been consulted on this issue and its strong advice is that this would create a huge additional workload that would have huge resource implications for all legislation.

I referred last week to the codification programme for the criminal law under way in the Department. An Agreed Programme for Government contained a commitment that all substantive criminal law would be codified into a single crimes Act. An expert group has been set up to advise on the scope of the codification and is due to report early next year. The codification programme will provide an opportunity to gender-proof all criminal legislation and consider the recommendations of the Law Reform Commission on plain language.