Averil Power (Fianna Fail)

I thank Senators on all sides of the House for their contributions to the debate and thank the Ministers, Deputies Shatter and Quinn, for attending and giving us their views. I reiterate the commitment I made at the start. I had hoped we could agree on this issue as a matter of principle and finalise the text later on Committee Stage. I still believe it would be good to send out the message that we accept the urgency of it, want the Bill to move on and can argue over language later.

My concern is that progress should happen soon. Since I published the Bill, many people have contacted me to inform me that it is a real issue for them every day and is making them miserable. I made that point to the Minister and to other Members of the House over the past two months since we introduced the Bill. It is a real issue and it is immediate. When we initially started discussions with Members on the other side of the House I had hoped we could agree to progress this through to the next stage and that we could do that quite quickly. I am genuinely disappointed with a delay until January 2013, because if we suspend the Bill today, it will be January before anything could happen. As we would not have completed Second Stage we would need to restart the whole process again, which I find disappointing.

I appreciate that there are differences in wording. I again draw attention to the fact that the Bill was deliberately designed to balance different interests - the ones the Minister mentioned relating to people's religious rights and those of the individual to be protected. I believe it is proportionate and fair. There are obviously different perspectives in the House with some people wishing to delete the section altogether. My advice is that that would be unconstitutional. We could get into a nasty and unpleasant row about religion by taking on a broader fight and dragging lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people into it.

Over the past week discussions about timeframes have changed. We started off with a short timeframe which got progressively longer. Each night when I went home I had to think about what was the right thing to do with the Bill because I genuinely wanted Members on all sides of the House to send out a message that we are united on this.