Brendan Ryan (Labour)

—— and the Oireachtas has been taken up with an issue that common sense should have dictated. In other places which I will not mention because it might get people into trouble, for instance, in rural areas, common sense approaches are taken to how the licensing laws are enforced. Reasonable positions are adopted by reasonable members of the Garda Síochána to be reasonable to the people in the communities in which they live and it works extremely well. Suddenly somebody somewhere decided to pursue this. It is still a matter of some contention to me.

I am not particularly taken with the decision to move the 9 p.m. watershed to 10 p.m. for four months of the year. It is one step back towards a time when we had different laws for different times of the year. I cannot see why the new time could not apply to the whole year. This is an issue that needs to be revisited regularly. I do not disagree with what the Minister wants to do or with his unhappiness with the culture that has developed. However, I am not sure that having different thresholds for different times of the year is a good idea. I will be suggesting that it be amended. A good friend of mine, who runs a successful bed and breakfast and restaurant, recently received a Bord Fáilte representative. A question arose over licensing when the Bord Fáilte official claimed that what my friend described as a "counter" was in fact a "bar". The Bord Fáilte official then asserted that it was a bar if he said so. This is not a basis for good law. If definitions are needed, they should not leave power in the hands of middle-ranking individuals who like to flex their muscles.