Barry Ward (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 1:

In page 5, between lines 21 and 22, to insert the following:

“Amendment of section 2 of Act of 2010

2. The Act of 2010 is amended by the substitution of the following section for section 2:

“Interpretation

2.(1) In this Act—

‘Data Protection Regulation’ means Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation);

‘Fourth Money Laundering Directive’ means Directive (EU) 2015/849 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 May 2015 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing, amending Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council, and repealing Directive 2005/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council and Commission Directive 2006/70/EC;

‘Fifth Money Laundering Directive’ means Directive (EU) 2018/843 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2018 amending Directive (EU) 2015/849 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing, and amending Directives 2009/138/EC and 2013/36/EU;

‘Minister’ means the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform;

‘money laundering’ means an offence under Part 2;

‘personal data’ means personal data within the meaning of—

(i) the Data Protection Act 1988,

(ii) the Data Protection Regulation, or

(iii) Part 5 of the Data Protection Act 2018;

‘prescribed’ means prescribed by the Minister by regulations made under this Act;

‘property’ means all real or personal property, whether or not heritable or moveable, and includes money and choses in action and any other intangible or incorporeal property;

‘terrorist financing’ means an offence under section 13 of the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act 2005;

‘Third Money Laundering Directive’ means Directive 2005/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 October 2005 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purpose of money laundering and terrorist financing, as amended by the following:

(a) Directive 2007/64/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 November 2007 on payment services in the internal market amending Directives 97/7/EC, 2002/65/EC, 2005/60/EC and 2006/48/EC and repealing Directive 97/5/EC;

(b) Directive 2009/110/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 September 2009 on the taking up, pursuit and prudential supervision of the business of electronic money institutions amending Directives 2005/60/EC and 2006/48/EC and repealing Directive 2000/46/EC.

(2) A word or expression used in this Act and also used in the Fourth Money Laundering Directive has, unless the contrary intention appears, the same meaningin this Act as in that Directive.

(3) In this Act a reference to an Appeal Tribunal shall be construed as a reference to the Appeal Tribunal established under section 101A (inserted by section 24 of the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) (Amendment) Act 2020).”.”.

I have tabled a number of amendments to this Bill, not just to this section but to a range of sections, and they all essentially seek to do the same thing. It relates to a matter that I raised on Second Stage, which is a tremendously important one nobody would dispute. It puts in place a streamline that is welcome and implements the provisions of the fifth directive from the European Union, which is important as well as being legally obligatory.

However, this is the third Bill in this vein. We had an initial Bill in 2010; it was amended in 2018, and is now being amended again, with the result that the final Bill which may be passed now will essentially amend the 2010 Act. It will be an extremely cumbersome instrument because anybody reading it must essentially refer to three Bills simultaneously to ascertain exactly what the Act we pass in the Houses under this guise will say and how exactly it will implement the directive.

I understand why that happens and there is a practice in these Houses that when we amend legislation, we put into the amending Bill the exact provision that is being changed and how it is being changed. What we do not do is list the new section and how the new section has been changed, or even the new subsection, with the result that one may have a single line in an amending Bill. The point that I made on Second Stage is that that makes it very difficult, if not nigh impossible, for an ordinary citizen or indeed any non-lawyer - although I suspect many lawyers as well - to read and understand the legislation without significant study and effort.

In this amendment, I have simply set out what the interpretation of section 2 of the of the 2010 Act would look like if the amendment of this Bill were put in place as we know or expect it will be. Essentially, I have restated section 2 of the 2010 Act as it will look after this legislation passes.

I am absolutely indebted to the work done by the Law Reform Commission in this regard. Members will be aware, as I have mentioned it in this House before, that the commission carries out a hugely important civic function by putting together consolidated Acts where we have amending legislation. Where there is a sequence of amending legislation, the Law Reform Commission undertakes a project to make freely available online the consolidated Act, as amended. It will show each step of the way through why, how and what operation has been done to change the Bill. That is very valuable, particularly for Senators and Deputies, but also for members of the public.

The argument I am making here is that we should be doing this all the time and going out of our way to make legislation accessible for everyone, and for people who have to read and live by the terms of the legislation. There are many issues involved in this. I am not even talking about any particular issue, merely about the accessibility and legibility of the legislation that is passed by these Houses.

The series of amendments - I am only going to speak on this one because I do not wish to delay the House - that I have tabled are to show how that can be done. I am just one person and I do it myself and I have prepared it in time for this Committee Stage. The Department with its vast resources - I am aware of the armies of people that the Minister of State has at his beck and call every day - could give effect to this relatively easily, but particularly where the Law Reform Commission has already done the work. It did not take very much for me to go on to their website to look at their work and to transfer that into amendments to this Bill. It can be easily done.

I understand the Department is reluctant to do this for a whole range of reasons. There is, for example, the loss of the legislative history which is one of the things that we can look at in this House. In the past year, for example, we have twice amended the Health Act 1947 with two successive Bills and it is very easy to go back and trace how the Health Act has changed since the1940s. There is, however, another way of doing that. We do not have to record that in successive amending Bills. We can simply have, as we used to have, the chronological tables, for example, on the Statute Book that is available online and we could easily create a section which shows the progress of a piece of legislation, how and when it has changed, etc. It could be linked into the debates that are recorded, again freely, on the Oireachtas website.I do not really accept that as an argument for not doing this. As I said on Second Stage, there is an administrative argument. It clearly creates an administrative burden on the Department and presumably on the Office of the Attorney General, which carries out the technical amendments and drafting of the Bill. I can see how the generation of paper etc. might be a problem. However, we must decide if that difficulty outweighs the benefit of having legislation that is much more accessible to members of the public. I am sure there are other administrative problems.

My fundamental reason for tabling this and succeeding amendments is to put down some kind of marker to let people know we no longer want to have a raft of legislation. In certain areas this is obvious, for example, in road traffic legislation. In the 1990s, we consolidated social welfare legislation. We could take many other steps. Certain streams of legislation are largely inaccessible to members of the public because of how we are passing them in these Houses. In tabling these amendments I am trying to say to the Minister of State, his Department and the people within government who are responsible for legislation that we should be taking steps to make legislation more legible and more accessible to the public and everyone else. I do not propose to press the amendment. I am tabling it really to have an opportunity to raise the point with the Minister of State.