Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, to the House. This is very welcome legislation. It has bee a long time coming, and some political parties have dragged their heels for a hell of a long time. There have been many commitments, but we are now seeing it done, ultimately under the Minister of State's remit. I welcome it and I thank the Minister of State for how he has laid it out, in very simple terms.

I would like to take the Minister of State up on the invitation he has extended for a more technical briefing. That is important. On behalf of the Independent Group of Senators, I will be in touch with the Minister of State's office to set up a brief engagement with our group in the Seanad. However, I am supportive of it. It is important.

I am a great supporter of pre-legislative scrutiny in this House. It is one of the few places where we get that real buy-in cross-party. My colleague, Senator Seery Kearney, and I are involved in other pre-legislative scrutiny at the moment, so we are hopping between the two. However, there is a lot of effort put into the pre-legislative scrutiny. One of the great things is that one can then equip one's self with the final document and bring it to the House to debate it when one is tabling amendments to the legislation or seeking the rationale of a Minister who rejects them.

On the pre-legislative scrutiny report, the Minister of State identified a number of proposals in it that were not acceptable to his Department for various reasons, whether legal or financial, or due to subsequent consequences or follow-through. I respect that, and that has been teased out. However, I would like to understand the rationale behind that. I do not sit on that committee.

At the end of the day, the Minister of State's Government party members sit on that committee. They have made recommendations, and not all of them have been accepted, so we need to tease it out. It is not enough to keep coming in here and to say we agree with everything. This is a debating Chamber; this is a revising Chamber. This is where we conduct our business in a public forum, where the public can see what is going on.

I thank the Minister of State. I am broadly supportive of all of this. It is welcome and long overdue, but I would like to take up the Minister of State's invitation to have a briefing with our group and to have some explanation of the detailed rationale as to why some recommendations in the pre-legislative scrutiny report were not considered appropriate to be included in this Bill.