Rónán Mullen (Independent)

I move amendment No. 2:

In page 4, to delete lines 10 to 21, and substitute the following:

"(3) Section 184C(2) of the Principal Act is amended by deleting the figures "10" and inserting the figure "8".".

I welcome the Minister to the House. Yesterday, the Minister said that I had substantially repeated my Second Stage speech. I do not intend to do that today, but I also deny that is what I did yesterday. The reason for what I said yesterday is that on Committee Stage one must give precise reasons for a proposed amendment. I was not satisfied with the Minister's Second Stage speech or with his response following Second Stage, nor was I satisfied with what I heard yesterday. The Minister has been more forthcoming today and deserves credit for that.

However, I would like to remind him of something I said to him the other day, which is that I am not in opposition to him. I am calling the House's attention to an issue that I think is very important, and I have a duty to do that. I regard the Minister as a smart and able person, and well fit for this Ministry. I am somewhat disappointed that in addressing the speeches of Senator O'Donovan and others here today, he has been guilty of a certain amount of elegant imprecision, which is that he has sought to tar us all with the one brush. In spite of some helpful prompting on my part, he failed to acknowledge that the amendments I proposed do not in any way take from his goal of widening the pool of potential applicants for the posts of director of military prosecutions and military judge. I told him that I agreed with two out of three of the substantial proposals in this Bill, and I made that clear to him on Second Stage. For a man of his intelligence, I must say that it is not good enough to pretend by omission that I am somehow seeking to maintain a closed shop for the potential pool of applicants for these posts. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I completely support the opening up of the candidacy beyond the Defence Forces to practising barristers and solicitors of ten years' standing. I also support the maintenance of the current position, which is that people for whom it was a requirement to be a barrister or solicitor - though they may not have practised - may also be included in the potential pool of applicants. I support the aspiration to reduce the required period of service from ten years to eight years, because I believe that people who have at least eight years of service in a position which requires them to be a practising barrister and solicitor are at least as worthy of consideration for a position as people who, according to the Minister's proposal, would have ten years of service but not in a position in which it was required that they be a barrister or solicitor, although they may have acquired a barrister's or solicitor's qualification along the way. That is an issue on which we may disagree, but it is far from being at the centre of my objections to what has happened with this Bill in the way it was presented and in the substance of the Bill itself. I think the Minister needs to acknowledge that.

I made two principled objections to the Bill. The first was an accusation of a lack of transparency, which I stand over. The Minister makes much of the fact that the circumstances of a particular individual have been brought to light or addressed in this Chamber. As I said to him yesterday, sometimes it is necessary to do that. It is all the more necessary to do that when neither he nor his officials made any attempt to apprise us of the personal and particular issues that lay behind one aspect of what he proposes in the Bill. He has as much as acknowledged today that at least one part of this Bill is designed to cure the defect around the qualification of the particular person who was appointed, but whose appointment was not allowed to proceed because an issue had arisen about that person's statutory eligibility.

The Minister asked me to address one issue in particular, which was that of the whistleblowers. These are the people who may have been involved in providing Senators in this House with information which was relevant to this Bill. Those persons, both serving and retired Army personnel, have acted in good faith at all times in my estimation. In so far as I took any briefing from anybody, I was very careful to ascertain whether those persons had a particular horse in the race, and I am quite satisfied with the answers I received. Nothing the Minister has said today suggests that I have been in any way misinformed. However, given the lack of openness from his Department until we put the issues to him, I must say that I would not have any faith that those whistleblowers would be treated properly were their identities to become known. It was suggested to me by one official that were it to be found out how the document, of which I knew the origin and content, came to light, somebody would be in the dock. I wonder about that in the context of the Government's commitment to the introduction of whistleblowing legislation. I wonder about that in the context of the Private Members' motion I had before this House last week on the need to bring forward such legislation.