Ivana Bacik (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I offered my congratulations to Senator Grace O'Sullivan yesterday. Judging by her Twitter account, she appears to be very active in Brussels already. I am really delighted for the Senator. Her victory in the European elections was well deserved.

I support the proposal to amend the Order of Business - made by Senator Ó Ríordáin and seconded by Senator Ruane - to adjourn the Committee Stage debate on the Adoption (Information and Tracing) Bill at 6 p.m. rather than letting it run until 9 p.m. I was one of the Senators who engaged in the Second Stage debate on the Bill, which took place more than two years ago, on 22 March 2017. At that time, we were promised consultation on amendments to address the concerns many of us raised about the way in which privacy rights were appearing to trump rights to information. We waited for over two years and amendments were finally produced very late on Monday night. My assistant, along with others, attended a briefing organised by the Minister on Monday evening but the amendments were not even provided then. They were provided later and we have really only had one day to grapple with them. There are, as Senator Ruane pointed out, 161 amendments in total. The Labour Party has other amendments but we did not put them forward for Committee Stage precisely because we had not had sight of the Government's amendments by Monday, which was the deadline for submission. We wanted to reserve our position in order that we would not duplicate anything. Plenty of other colleagues submitted amendments. Indeed, there is a huge number of amendments to the Bill, many of which have been tabled by the Minister. However, those amendments were only made available to us after the deadline for submission had passed and that is simply not acceptable.

In terms of Seanad procedures, I do not know why a Committee Stage debate is being scheduled to run from the afternoon until 9 p.m. Again, that was just indicated to the House by the Leader. While I know that this is what the Leader has been asked to do, it looks as if an attempt is being made to just ram through the Government amendments-----