Imelda Munster (Louth, Sinn Fein)
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1221. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the projects undertaken to consolidate or amalgamate existing legislation, including the cost, the duration, the number of staff required and if this process was carried out by his Department or outsourced in each of the years 2007 to 2017 and to date in 2018, in tabular form. [1557/18]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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My Department’s legislation regulates a diverse range of areas such as food safety (including animal health and welfare), agriculture (including payments) and seafood (including State fisheries). In the period in question, my Department made more than 700 separate pieces of legislation.

Our membership of the European Union means that there are substantial and ongoing changes in legislation at EU level and my Department updates its legislation regularly to reflect these changes. As a result, there has been little requirement to consolidate the Department’s legislative codes.

In addition, because of the constant updating of the Department’s legislation, the skills developed within the Department to draft legislation mean that there is no requirement to outsource this task.

There were no consolidation projects completed within the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine in the relevant time period.