Does any member of the Committee on Procedure move this Report?
THIRD REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON PROCEDURE.
I am a member of the Committee on Procedure, but I got no expressed instructions with regard to that particular Report. I moved one some ten or fifteen days ago and it was referred back. However, I will undertake the task of trying to pilot this Report through. The first six proposed new Standing Orders deal with the procedure upon the opening of a new Dáil, and as we now seem to be in a clearly moribund condition it is eminently desirable that we should make provision for what is to happen when our successor comes into his own, and there will be the necessary procedure, after the election has been held, for the opening of a new Dáil. The Committee on Procedure have endeavoured to frame rules that will meet the situation that will then arise. The first of the new Standing Orders provides that when all the returns for the writs have come into the hands of the Clerk he sends the notices to all Teachtai who have been returned and notifies them that their attendance is required here on a day or days which will be set out in the notice, and it will be before the actual hour at which the Dáil will assemble for the transaction of business. The object of that is that those Teachtaí that have been elected may get through the preliminaries, the signing of the Roll and the making of any declarations that they may be required to make in the office of the Clerk before the duly nominated person who has to look after that part of the business. Then the Dáil itself will be in a position actually to tackle the work of the day and at the hour at which it has been summoned to commence business, and there will not be, as there was at the beginning of this Dáil and as there is in Parliamentary assemblies elsewhere, a waste, in some cases as much as two days, before the Dáil can be got to do the business for which it has been summoned to meet. I do not know whether it would be better to take these Orders one by one or to deal with them in groups.
(who resumed the Chair at this stage): It depends upon what the desire of Deputies is, whether we should take these Orders one by one, in which case it might be better to go into Committee, or whether we could move the adoption of the Report and allow anybody who wishes to raise any point to do it on that motion.
I suggest it would be better for us to deal with it in Committee, because, of course, no amendments to these have been served or printed. I move that we go into Committee on the Report of the Committee on Procedure.
Agreed