Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

This Bill is an unusual one in that is has gone from this House to the other House. It was considered by the previous Seanad and is now coming back from the present Dáil. As Senator Wilson pointed out on the previous occasion, 80% of the Members of this House were not Members of the previous Seanad which considered this Bill, and although some of them were Members of the Dáil, the curious irony is that in their capacity as Members of Dáil Éireann, they did not get to debate this Bill either because it was only initiated after they had lost their seats.

We start from the proposition that we are considering this legislation in circumstances were 80% of the people in this House have never had an opportunity to discuss the principles that lie behind the Bill or the principles that lie behind any particular provision in the Bill until today. The Leas-Chathaoirleach read out the Standing Order which indicated that the First, Second and Third Stages of this Bill are deemed to have been passed already, which denies any Member, and I am speaking about myself, among others, who has a view about the principle of the Bill at large the chance to make a contribution in those circumstances. That is what has happened.

I am not going to waste much of the House's time on this issue, but I do want to make the point that the Constitution says that a Bill that is initiated in this House and amended in the other House is deemed to have been initiated in that House. It is very strange indeed that due to three card trickery in terms of the Standing Orders, which were clearly designed to deal with the situation where we in this House sent a Bill to the other House and got it back again, that we would not go over the whole territory again. That was never intended, in my view at any rate, to cover a situation where 80% of people in this House have not had the opportunity to contribute on the principles involved in a Bill.

I have to protest in the strongest possible way that all my efforts to deal with this matter or to adjourn it in order that we could put in place a different arrangement to deal with this Bill in these unique circumstances have been batted down because it is apparently essential that this Bill be dealt with this afternoon or this evening. I have to protest strongly about that. I will not put the matter any further, but I will deal with each of the provisions as they come up.

Regarding the child pornography provisions and the provisions we are dealing with regarding sexual exploitation of children and the penalties for child pornography, I agree with the amendments that have been made. We have to have a robust law. It is important to emphasise that we need, especially where people are going to visit children for the purposes of sexually exploiting them, to have laws in place which will be workable and to have inferences of law from certain activities which allow those kinds of offences to be prosecuted to completion. There is nothing as evil or as wrong as the sexual exploitation of children, and there is nothing as demanding of our protection as children who are at the wrong end of efforts to groom them by sexual predators, particularly now that we live in an age where this can all be done in the anonymity of their own bedroom over the Internet by people pretending to be children.

I want to make it clear, in case it is stated later that I am taking a slightly oppositionist position in respect of some provisions of this Bill, that I strongly support the amendments in group 1 that have been made in Dáil Éireann and I strongly support this aspect of the Bill. I deeply regret that I have not been given the opportunity to make a Second Stage speech on the legislation in its entirety and I protest in the strongest possible way that that is the case, but in the interests of good order, I am content to have had my say and to have put on the record why I will be taking a different attitude at later stages of this legislation. It should not be debated in this way. This House is a serious House. Its function is to revise legislation. The Members of this House's function is to look at legislation that comes from the Dáil and consider each and every part of that carefully.

It is also the duty of Members of this House to consider what former Members of the Seanad have passed and to see if it stands up to scrutiny. We are part of the constitutional arrangement whereby the two Houses of the Oireachtas have functions in scrutinising legislation. In theory, a majority of the Members of this Seanad could petition the President on this matter. In theory and in practice, Members of this House could ask the President to refer this Bill to the Supreme Court, and I will be coming back to that later in relation to the prostitution sections. I want to put on the record at the outset of the debate, because I notice that there are a number of people are present in the Public Gallery who have motives and records in promoting law reform, what I object to in the way in which this Bill has been dealt with in order that nobody can misinterpret my motives when I speak later on other parts of this legislation.