Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I was going to begin by saying I spoke more in sorrow than in anger but it is more with a sense of ironic hilarity than either sorrow or anger that I rise. That the security of the State is in the hands of a Department that deals with parliamentary process in the way this Minster has allowed is not something by which I feel threatened. The level of incompetence is so great that I do not feel threatened by the attempt to play the spook. I feel more insecure because it has failed to do the spook job properly. The presumption running through this process is that the Oireachtas is an inconvenient obstacle to the rule of the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. The Oireachtas is the best bastion the security of the State can have. Without a functioning Oireachtas, respected by the Executive, the State cannot be secure. That is why I am motivated more by ironic hilarity than anything else.

This House devoted an enormous amount of its time to a thorough, detailed discussion of this Bill. Even the Minister, who understandably gets impatient with the process sometimes, did not believe that any Member of this House was deliberately wasting time on this Bill. It was treated with the respect it deserved.