Thomas Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I do not know what to say because this is outrageous. It is a bad precedent for the Seanad and the Dáil because while Governments, and this Government in particular, are prepared to guillotine legislation, I have never heard of a Minister's speech being guillotined in any Chamber. It is outrageous and people should object to that in a serious way. It is turning this Seanad into a rubber stamp and that is very unfortunate. We support this Bill. We have some reservations about it. I compliment Senator O'Donnell on her campaign on this because it is highlighting public interest in the matter, but we cannot support legislation that is going to be rammed through the Oireachtas or where the Minister is not prepared to set out why he wants to put this legislation through. That is a fundamental obligation of Government. It should set out the options because there are other amendments to this Bill, not just regarding the national lottery, but also regarding the Gaming and Lotteries Act. I call on the Cathaoirleach to ask the Minister to withdraw his allegation about my being unprepared for this debate as the reason for my standing up. That was outrageous and uncalled for from a Minister of State.

We support this Bill. We have debated this Bill in the Seanad before in Private Members' time and it has come up on numerous occasions. We support the idea of a tendering process. We support the idea that the State would maximise the sale price, given that the Minister has said he will use the proceeds, or a large part thereof, for the national children's hospital. However it is a major flaw in the legislation that we must rely on a Labour Party promise to do this, rather than enshrining it in legislation. Unfortunately, the promises, the word or the solemn undertakings of Labour Party Ministers are not worth the paper they are written on. It is essential that this be provided for in legislation if this is actually what the Government intends to do.
That is a major flaw because the only way the Minister can sell this Bill, and possibly overcome some of the objections that Senator O'Donnell would put forward, is through the prospect of the national children's hospital, and that is not in the legislation. The legislation needs to be amended to ring fence money for the children's hospital. The same process needs to be fully transparent regarding tendering and the rating of bids for the licence, and documentation must be available for public inspection. The tendering process should take note of serious issues that arose during other tendering processes that members of this Government were involved in when they were in government previously. The Minister is already committed to having no contact with the parties involved. It is essential that no such contact would take place. The good causes issue is a flaw of the lottery generally. Money is not ring fenced for those good causes but is sent straight to the Exchequer. It has been a major flaw over many years that there was no express provision for that.

I hope we can get a more detailed debate on this Bill. I advocated undertaking this sort of procedure four years ago in 2009 with the then Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, when I felt it could pay for a certain amount of capital infrastructure in the State. My suggestion was schools and roads but the children's hospital is a good one and I would expect that it be provided for in legislation. I hope we will not have a guillotined debate on Committee Stage when we are going through this Bill line by line because we have effectively had a guillotined debate on Second Stage. We broadly support the Bill but we have concerns, which we will raise on Committee Stage. On Committee Stage I will ask the Minister, on every section, to outline what is proposed. That is very important. The public are watching this debate. They want to know. They do not have the printed statement in front of them. A very unfortunate precedent has been allowed to be set here today.