Regina Doherty (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

For the purpose of clarity, we should reflect on what the Minister of State said here on 29 June. I will not read out what she said, but I think we are all aware that she read out exactly how she has conducted the application of the drafting of the Bill. On that day, the Minister of State admitted that external advice was only obtained to insert the regulatory functions that the Minister of State was bringing to this Bill and that she relied solely on the Irish Aviation Authority, IAA, with regard to inserting new regulatory functions around peer support, the licenceholders' forum and the licenceholders' charter. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why taking external advice on one set of regulations makes it different from relying on internal expert advice for another regulation. The only conclusion that I come to is that the Minister of State took external advice on her own new regulations, because she knew she had to work under Article 4 of the European Aviation Safety Agency, EASA, regulation, but saw the Opposition amendments, which there were at the beginning of this Bill and which we have been debating since last July, as something that she was never going to entertain and, therefore, on which she did not need to obtain external advice.