Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for tabling this and other amendments. I acknowledge the point he has made, which follows on from the issue he raised on Second Stage in respect of his concern about legislation that has been enacted by the Houses of the Oireachtas but then not commenced, often for many years.

The reason the Road Traffic Acts generally state that provisions "commence on the day or days appointed by the Minister" is that, in many cases, administrative procedures need to be put in place before particular measures in the legislation can be enacted. This is a sound principle which I believe is particularly appropriate in the context of road traffic legislation. Looking at the group of amendments referred to by Senator Barrett in the context of items of previous road traffic legislation, the reason they have not been enacted is that they refer to what is often known as the third payment option, which gives people a further option to pay a fine before they end up going to court. The reason the group of sections have not been enacted is because of the amount of work that needed to be done. That work is being done now in order to put the administrative procedures in place. In this particular case, work needed to be done to put the IT infrastructure in place to then allow the enactment of the legislation. In regard to the third payment option, what was required in order for that to happen was to put in place a new piece of IT infrastructure to allow the option to be implemented. I am pleased to be able to confirm that we believe we will have this available for implementation by the middle of this year. The latter will then allow the commencement of the different sections of the previous Bill to which the Senator referred.

The reason I am not in a position to accept these amendments is that I believe it is a sound principle of policy making that we tie the commencement of particular sections to being in a place where we are ready to implement them, although I appreciate the intention behind the Senator's amendments. I would also would like to be in a situation where we can speedily enact the different provisions various items of road traffic legislation make available to us. However, it is good practice that we give ourselves the flexibility of not enacting sections until we are in a situation where we can make them happen.