Brendan Ryan (Labour)

The Oireachtas was not treated with the respect it deserved by the Minister and the Department. The Oireachtas was the subject of a farce last week, with amendments appearing out of fax machines at a rate that generated vast quantities of paper in Members' offices and even greater quantities of confusion.

I am not a lawyer but I have been in this House long enough that I am not bamboozled by lawyers. The production of 138 amendments was an attempt to bamboozle. As the Minister has stated, these are not the most significant amendments.

The Minister knows the quality of the capacity for persistence of my colleague Deputy Joe Costello. If the Minister has agreed the Garda Síochána now has a specific purpose of dealing with immigration, are all past dealings in this area now of dubious legality? Does this invite legal challenges? Perhaps it does not but at this stage one takes Government advice on what is legal and proper with a grain of salt. I refer to the nursing home debacle and the scandal of the delay before the Morris tribunal was set up. The obfuscation by various people regarding what they knew, what information they had, what they did with it and why they did not deal with it, is most peculiar. If the Minister were to tell me he is categorically assured that the legislation is satisfactory, I would be sceptical, and the public is also entitled to be sceptical.

I can guarantee that some time in the future a major flaw will be detected in one of these amendments. I have been in and out of this House for 25 years and we have been embarrassed by errors in amendments in the past. Last week we spotted an error in the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Amendment) Bill. This can only have been the product of rushed drafting. It was spotted by the plebeian footsoldiers of the Opposition in this House, after the great minds of Parliamentary Counsel's Office, the Attorney General and everyone else missed it.

That is what the Oireachtas does best — it looks at things without the protection of a sense of its own importance but with the belief that if the Members cannot understand it, there is probably something wrong with it. Sometime in the future some error will be found and some sanctimonious person, probably in the legal profession, will give us a lecture on how the Oireachtas did not do its duty. The Oireachtas is ready, willing and able to do its duty and it is the Government that did not do its duty in this rushed, hamfisted job. This is epitomised by the fact that there were errors in the groupings of amendments because it was rushed. Nobody is infallible or immune to the errors that come from being rushed. People in the background seem to believe they are infallible but we all know they are not.

The Minister may tell me my party supported this next point but that does not trouble me. I think student members of the Garda Síochána should be members of USI, like any other student. To be members of an ordinary student union when they are undergraduates would be a healthy experience for them. This would give them an injection of the reality of life rather than being confined to a particularly inward-looking trade union. It is a trade union which would be better off being part of the process of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, as that would give it an injection of reality. We are not going to fall out over this matter.

I am glad there is an explicit assertion of the duty of the Garda Síochána to vindicate human rights. Perhaps we will not have a repetition of an episode a few years ago when correspondence to Members of this House was seized by the Garda Síochána because it was a letter from a garda about a human rights issue. It was opened by accident, gardaí seized all of the letters and used a letter as evidence in a disciplinary matter within the Garda Síochána. It was a letter to my colleague Senator O'Meara, who did not know the letter existed. This is all a matter of public record. Perhaps it will be accepted that the job of the Garda Síochána is to vindicate human rights and this sort of incident will not happen again.