Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The Minister's analysis of my amendment ignores completely the provisions of section 54, which ensure that the commission itself, which is in the majority composed of lay persons, gets to approve or disapprove any statements which are developed under section 53, to modify them as it considers appropriate, to approve them as so modified, or to refuse to approve them. This means that the lay majority has the clear right to reject the proposals of the procedures committee as to draft statements if it does not like those proposals. All I am suggesting is that it makes a good deal of sense to have people who know what they are talking about drafting the criteria that are of a technical kind.In this case, the technical subject is the law itself and knowledge thereof.

On this amendment, there is no question of banishing laypeople to exterior darkness, silencing them or making them incapable of having an input on the matter. It is a question of whether they should do the original drafting or not and whether they should be in a majority on the drafting committee in respect of areas of the commission's activities that require legal experience and legal understanding. Those capabilities are not to be presumed in the case of laypeople and if lawyers are disqualified from being among the laypeople, who are to be in a majority, the criterion for excluding people with legal understanding seems to me to be incompatible with making such people the drafters as to legal expertise.