Mark Daly (Fianna Fail)

I support my colleagues opposite on amending the Valuations Act 2001. I also met the organisation which is running the campaign on commercial rates. I suggested that we would support any amendment to the Act that would allow a right of appeal. Will the Leader bring such legislation to the House at the earliest opportunity.

I agree with Senator Byrne. I, too, raised the issue of RTE and I hope the Leader will ask the Committee on Procedure and Privileges to investigate whether the station contacted this House to gently remind us to keep our noses out of its misdeeds. It would be a bad development for democracy if the fourth estate dictated to us what we can and cannot say.

I ask the Leader to arrange for a debate with the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade on the backlog of EU legislation that has built up since the general election. We learned at yesterday's meeting of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade that 57 items of legislation are awaiting review by committees. Since the second Lisbon referendum, 132 items of European legislation have been sent to the Oireachtas. All parliaments are supposed to make formal submissions after eight weeks but none of the 428 submissions made were by the Houses of the Oireachtas. We have passed more items of European legislation without amendment than we have passed in this Dáil and its two predecessors, combined.

To the public, it must sound like a disgrace that we allowed so much European legislation to pass through these Houses without making one iota of a change to it. That is a failure of the system and it cannot be allowed to continue. I ask the Leader to bring the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade to the House for a discussion on the 57 pieces of legislation we are supposed to review before next week. It is possible that they will all have to be passed within seven days. That does not sound like a functioning democracy. As I said at yesterday's meeting of the committee, it sounds like a rubber-stamping operation. We do not have the facilities, the legal expertise or the independent advice of the bureaucrats in the European Union that we need to guide us in the right direction. That will come back to haunt us when the legislation takes effect five or six years from now.