Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am more than happy to do so. I want an all-party discussion on this matter. I have been presented with opinion by the Department, which spent a lot of time looking at this. The Department got a very clear instruction from me to provide the heads of the Bill to me. It has been working very hard to that effect and has come back to say that this is very difficult to do. I am sure that if it were easy to do, Senator Conway's party would have done it in the previous Dáil, during the term of the previous Government, but it did not. One of the reasons it did not was that An Garda Síochána said it did not need this measure and had very strong advice stating that it was not necessary, would not be constitutional, would not survive a challenge and so forth. I have given very clear instruction to the Department to find solutions to the very serious challenges.

I want to make sure that there is a discussion on a cross-party basis that shapes this legislation. If I were to come up with heads of the Bill and send them to the committee for pre-legislative scrutiny, that would significantly narrow the debate, as we are all aware. The committee can respond only to what is before it. I want a broad conversation. There has to be all-party input to this from both those who agree and those who disagree with the legislation, which is absolutely fine. In the context of what we are legislating for, this is unlike a lot of the other health Bills we see, where there is a very clear policy intent, heads of the Bill are created and the detail can then be discussed. In this case, the advice I have back from the Department is that, potentially, some quite significant trade-offs must be made here. We are looking at constitutionality, civil liberties, freedom of speech and so on. It is appropriate, given the magnitude of that to which I refer, that this is discussed in the coming weeks, that we find a way forward and that we then present the heads of the Bill. I would then bring a memorandum to the Government and that would then go to the health committee for pre-legislative scrutiny.