Dermot Ahern (Louth, Fianna Fail)

It is up to the Government to propose and the Oireachtas to dispose. The LRC gives advice, but it is not an oracle. The Government can take or reject the LRC's advice. It must also take advice from the Attorney General and listen to vested interests, the Opposition and the media. We do not have an ongoing communication with the LRC as regards this Bill. I appreciate the work that the commission regularly does on many issues and we can take some of its reports verbatim. If it proposes a Bill, we can sometimes, but not always, take the bones of that Bill, but we could not do so in this instance. This issue crosses so many Departments it was necessary for the Tánaiste, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, a significant number of officials and me to sit down on a regular basis to try to pull everything together. Many of the measures contained in the Bill were not dealt with by the Law Reform Commission. We considered that, as we were passing legislation, we should do so as comprehensively as possible. I say this with due respect to the Law Reform Commission.