Brendan Ryan (Labour)

Cuirim fáilte roimh an reachtaíocht seo agus roimh an Aire Stáit agus an méid dearfach a bhí le rá aige. He could have gone further but I will leave it to Senator Henry to deal with that.

I am in and out of this House for a long time; Members opposite may consider it too long a time. It is 20 years since I first heard a Minister acknowledge the existence of offensive language in legislation. Words like "imbecile" and "lunatic" are inappropriate. There are others I cannot recall and which I might not wish to put on the record in any case. If I were to offer a crusading Minister a single action to take, it would be to go through all the legislation and remove those terms once and for all. They are profoundly offensive. They are also inaccurate in many cases because they presume the opposite of what the Law Reform Commission report makes clear is the case, that is, they presume it is possible to make an absolute distinction between people who have capacity and those who do not. The reality is that there is a spectrum rather than a single threshold. Ascertaining a person's position on that spectrum is where difficulties arise.

One of the benefits of the diligence of people such as Senator Henry is that lazy people like me are forced to read reports we always intended to read but never managed. I am a reasonably good reader but there is a wonderful pile of Law Reform Commission reports sitting on my desk. Perhaps others Members are more diligent but I doubt it. We hear about these reports in the news but tend not to read the reports themselves.

Every Law Reform Commission report I have read has impressed me. They are elegantly written, comprehensible to mere lay people like ourselves and, in cases where they offer draft legislation, do much of the work we should be doing. I compliment Senator Henry on undertaking the obvious course well in introducing the Bill that the Law Reform Commission drafted. It is a route that any of us who survive the oncoming deluge might consider in future. Members on the other side of the House who will be on this side after the election might be particularly interested in such an approach.