Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State, his officials and all Members for the debate on this issue. I hope they will support the amendment in my name. This goes back to the issue of education and to the review of the Act to ensure that it is operating correctly. It will ensure that there will be a requirement on the State, long after we have shuffled off this mortal coil, to produce reports on the workings of the provisions of the Bill, which will include input from members of the deaf community, users, representative organisations, families of the users, Members of this House and members of the Joint Committee on Justice and Equality. Five years seems like a long interval between reviews, but there is nothing to stop the Joint Committee on Justice and Equality producing a report every year or to prevent anybody bringing up issues in this regard in the House or individually. It will be a total review of the legislation.

We have found that the issue of access to education for children has been very difficult to resolve in other jurisdictions. Before I had even made my first attempt to produce a Bill on this issue in 2013, Scotland had passed legislation of this nature. Even that jurisdiction is not happy with the education section of its Act. New Zealand has also had this difficulty and did not include a provision for access to education in its equivalent legislation. It is now going through the enormous process of trying to rectify that omission in legislation.

It has taken a colossal effort on the part of many people to get this legislation this far. The idea of even having to amend it at some future date would be enormously daunting. This amendment will not stop provisions being changed by policy decisions, budgetary allocations or ministerial decision. That could only happen, however, if there is onus on the Government to review this legislation every five years. That would mean that the deaf community could list the parts of the legislation, or the parts of policy falling outside the legislation, which they feel are not working. That report or review could then be debated in this House and there would be an onus on the Government to then implement the recommendations or requirements. If that has not been done five years later, the recommendations will have formed a benchmark against which to measure implementation.

This is not a perfect system but we have to live in the world of what is doable. What matters is what works. This works. As I said, it is not what we started out with and hoped to achieve, which was to require a review every three years, but it is something that should be done with legislation because it allows for review and allows people to look at provisions which may not be working as intended. I hope the Minister of State will be able to support our requirement for a review of the operation of the legislation.