Rónán Mullen (Independent)

While I commend the Minister for bringing this Bill before the House, I do so with reservations. It may be quaint to ponder life in the 1800s and the legislative cures required at the time but I question the Bill's value in improving the accessibility of legislation for those who need to consult the law today. I acknowledge the work that has gone into this Bill and other statute law revision Acts in recent years but the fact remains that it is a rather grand academic exercise. The bulk of the laws governing Irish society today were introduced in the past 50 years. Repealing or retaining a specific list of pre-1922 statutes may constitute good housekeeping but it will do nothing to make the law more accessible. Statute law revision is a luxury we cannot afford. If the Statute Book can be compared to an old and dilapidated house, instead of spending money on careful restoration we are spending it on the equivalent of a lavish swimming pool.

The problems individuals experience in understanding legislation can be revealed from a random examination of virtually any area of the law. For example, the legislation directory entry for the Roads Act 1993 reveals that it has been amendment more than 170 times by 12 or 13 different Acts. Anyone who wants to understand the law in that area must grapple with these latter Acts. The Freedom of Information Act 1997 has been amended more than 100 times by a multitude of Acts. These are not isolated examples.

Some of the big law firms around town charge €300 or €400 per hour. When a client approaches them with a legal query, one of the first things they must do is identify the law applicable to the problem. This is no easy task because, as my colleagues will be aware, legislation on any given matter can be found in a principle Act and layer upon layer of amending Acts. To understand the current law the reader has to piece together the principle Act along with all the amendments. This can take a lot of time and when one is paying a solicitor by the hour it adds up to a considerable sum simply to understand the legislation. I hazard the guess that hundreds of thousands of euro, at a minimum, are paid to lawyers every year by individuals and businesses trying to figure out the law. That hardly makes us a competitive economy. This cost does not even take account of the amount of time Departments and State bodies spend on trying to understand the legislation which governs us. The Minister of State need not take my word that Irish legislation can be impervious to the most diligent lawyer, never mind the layperson. This is recognised by the review of better regulation in Ireland published by the OECD in 2010, which states:

Simple, effective and transparent access to regulations does not exist in Ireland. There is a consensus (both within and outside the administration) over the fact that it is difficult to understand what regulations apply, and what is in the law (lawyers systematically need to be consulted, and even they have trouble).

Our legal system relies heavily on the principle that ignorance of the law is no defence. In practice this means that a person who is charged with an offence cannot claim in court that he or she was unaware that the law prohibited his or her action. In theory this presumes that citizens know every section of every Act or statutory instrument but if we are to sustain this principle we must do more to make the law accessible to citizens. As matters stand, Acts are published only in their as enacted form. When we pass a Bill amending pre-existing law it simply adds another layer onto the original law. No effort is made to incorporate the new law into the old law and republish it as amended. Several countries have moved to a system of making laws as amended available online.

The Law Reform Commission has for several years been driving the statute law restatement project, which it produces versions of selected laws in their amended form. I commend the commission for its work in this regard but a severe lack of funds mean that it is only able to tackle a tiny portion of the legislation in force.

The unavoidable conclusion of an examination of the current situation is that one side of the Office of the Attorney General, the statute law revision team, is spending years tidying the Statute Book, while the legislative drafting side is applying its industry to foster incoherence and inaccessibility by persisting with the old approach of amendment heaped on amendment, combined with inadequate publication. Approximately 3,300 post-1922 Acts are on the Statute Book. In these days of limited resources we should focus our efforts on making those Acts more accessible. The State needs to work towards the development of a database of revised statutes which would contain legislation in its in force condition, incorporating the effect of all amendments while omitting spent Acts or repealed provisions. By removing the deadwood and reflecting the effect of amendments, the publication of revised statutes would vastly improve the accessibility of legislation. This has already been achieved in other countries, as was pointed out by the Law Reform Commission in its report on the legislation directory. Out of the 33 European legal systems it examined, 27 had at least one official collection of consolidated texts of legislation and 25 made their collections available on-line.

For these reasons I commend the Bill but question the value of an exercise focused on repealing or retaining pre-1922 statutes when the post-1922 Statute Book is in such a poor and inaccessible state.