Michael McDowell (Dublin South East, Progressive Democrats)

In response to the Leader's last point I intend to introduce the codification Bill in Seanad Éireann as soon as it is drafted, which is important. There were and are different views about the 9 o'clock threshold. In case people get carried away with how right they were in the past, which we all have a tendency to do, when I moved the time from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock, some Senators, including Senator Bohan, welcomed it and said it was not far enough but Senator Terry on behalf of the Fine Gael group said:

This is proof that one cannot please everybody. I would have preferred the time to be left at 8 p.m. However, perhaps this is a difference between Dublin and the country. When one goes into a pub on a Sunday evening, one will regularly see children running around. They should not be there after 8 p.m. However, I do not have a difficulty with the provision because the single hour does not make a great deal of difference. Pubs that serve food could install a separate dining area which would only be used for dining and by families with young children.

All of this was true. The threshold was not motivated by a desire on my part to prevent children being in, for example, a local pub such as The Dropping Well in my constituency, after any particular hour of the night. It was designed to make some starting point after which a member of the Garda Síochána could go into The Dropping Well and identify 16 or 17 year olds drinking and say the publican was committing an offence. It is not intended to stop toddlers annoying people and knocking down their drinks while chasing one another around. It also marks an hour when somebody between the ages of 18 and 21 would be obliged to produce evidence of their age. I am not attempting to create a nanny state to control toddlers who are annoying their elders but to establish some point in the day when the gardaí can tell a publican he or she has 16 or 17 year olds on the premises and is breaching the law.

It is easier to talk about the need to control the so-called alarming development of distance sales than actually to control them. If, for example, Senator Quinn's supermarket has a delivery service and I order a case of Beaujolais, that is a distance sale. Will it be illegal if the case of Beaujolais arrives at the house and there is a child there? We must be very careful about where we go with these concepts. It is easier to talk about them than to legislate for them.

I agree with Senator Quinn that we cannot deal with all issues by legislation. There are very strict limits on what legislation can achieve. I was very conscious in the 2003 Act that I was going as far as I could at the time to address what was then regarded as a very serious problem. It is amazing how people's attitudes change. There were "Prime Time" programmes showing young children having their stomachs pumped in hospital. People asked me what I was going to do and I could have archly said: "It is a matter for people to control their own behaviour, do not ask me." I could also have said that street violence is a matter of personal choice and people should not ask me what I am going to do about it. I could have said drunkenness in the streets is a matter of personal choice.