Feargal Quinn (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House again. He is obviously getting very fond of us. Touching on something Senator Sheahan said, I remember a similar Bill to this just a few years ago, in 2009. Review is ongoing and we need to do it every so often.

It was interesting to hear Senator O'Donovan talk about learning Latin. I met an American lady the other day who asked about my children and mentioned that I had encouraged them all to learn Latin. She responded that this would be very useful if they ever visited Latin America.

I am delighted with this Bill and am delighted these steps are being taken. As Senator Sheahan said, review should be ongoing. In 1971, I had the pleasure of ending up in court and winning a case, based on an Act introduced in 1938, that related to shop closing hours. I won my case, but the State appealed against me because the Act had been in existence from 1938 until 1968 or 1969. The issue went to the Supreme Court and again I won the case there. This was one of the few Acts with which I got involved. I learned constitutional law in college as part of my commerce degree and little thought I would ever use it. However, I used it in this particular case. Article 44 found that any legislation passed that discriminated on the grounds of religion was unconstitutional. The statutory instrument that provided that all butcher shops should close at 6 p.m. had excluded shops that sold kosher meat under the Jewish ritual method of killing and on that basis, I was able to find that the shop closing hours legislation was unconstitutional.

This legislation is a welcome piece of housekeeping that gets rids of laws that may cause confusion and demonstrates that we should not wait hundreds of years for the next clean up. It was interesting to hear Senator O'Donovan talk about some of the laws that existed. I would like to discuss the issue of reviewing laws in a more general way. We could follow the example of Germany, which conducts what it calls "spring clean ups" on a much more regular basis. Recently, it reduced approximately 2,000 laws to approximately 1,700. The Federal Ministry of Justice, the Parliament and the Cabinet there collaborate to write new orders and codes and to revise the old ones. Since 1976, they have created new codes of administrative law and have modernised the civil and criminal code. German laws use an open textured language of flexibility that also guides solutions to future problems, rather than the language of micro regulation more common in American law and in our laws. Section 242 of the German civil code is famous for how it tempers the code's rules with the general obligation of what they call "good faith". We all talk about making the Oireachtas more accessible to citizens and there have been calls to write laws in more simple and accessible language. However, the lawyers have always argued that we need complicated language in order to guard against misinterpretation. The German example however seems to work well.

We must also remember that the OECD regulatory reform programme encourages EU member states to conduct housekeeping of old laws, based on economics. It also encourages them to create new permanent high level government institutions to conduct economic policy reviews of both old and new laws to ensure that the economic burden of laws and regulations never outpaces their social utility. We do not have this function in Ireland, but it is needed. We need it to look at laws and see how they affect issues like business and the economy. In Germany, the national regulatory control council, which provides such a function, reports on the fifth anniversary of its establishment that it has saved Germany nearly €12 billion in unnecessary costs. Therefore, one of the reasons for us to do this is to reduce our costs.

The amount of red tape and bureaucracy involved with dealing with old laws makes things very difficult. I mentioned before that I was in Panama a few years ago. Panama wanted to become the country most attractive to new businesses and it aimed to establish the shortest timeframe for the setting up of a new business. I thought the target would be a few days, but it was seven hours. I do not think Panama has achieved that and I believe Singapore and Hong Kong have remained quicker, with a set up time of a few days. However, this example is a reminder that we can do something about the amount of bureaucracy and red tape that attaches to our legislation. One of the easiest ways to do that is through what is being done today, reviewing and abolishing old laws and ensuring we become a more attractive place in which to start a business.