I do not know whether other Deputies have noticed it, but there has within the last year or so been a very great addition to the number of what are in effect legislative acts that are completed by merely laying regulations on the Table—that is to say, we have added a great deal to the number of occasions when the Minister can make regulations which have the force of law by simply laying them on the Table, and we know very well that many of those regulations would, if they had undergone scrutiny, be amended in some degree. This proposal in the Bill is intended to follow the lines that the Ministry can do no wrong or the Ministry, if it is thought to be doing even a little wrong in the formulation of a regulation, must be defeated. By this method you are practically saying that the Ministry must be defeated on a vital issue and you are challenging the House to defeat the Ministry, and, by that way, you are running a risk or else you must accept the regulations en bloc, giving us no time whatever to call attention to errors or difficulties or unreasonable propositions. The Dáil cannot amend a regulation. It must defeat the Government. I think it is very much better to assume that the Ministry is not infallible, that it may make mistakes and that it may ask for powers unnecessarily wide, and that the Dáil is in a position to give consideration to regulations and to suggest amendments and even to impose amendments.
The position under the Bill is that we have no discretion. We have got to defeat the regulations, which means defeating the Ministry and risking a change of Government or dissolution at a time when everyone will say: "This is no time for changing Ministries." I cannot understand why a proposition of this kind cannot be accepted. This is the practice of the British Act, and their experience is much greater than ours. If they found it possible to do this thing by regulation without having power to amend I think they would have done it. If they thought there was any evil in this method they would have avoided that evil. It seems to me that in the Dáil we are foregoing some of our responsibility if we are to hand over to the Ministry our right of amending any regulation dealing with the most vital matters. We are inviting Ministers to add, illimitably almost, to the executive authority they have. We are giving them occasion to say: "You have got to take it or leave it," or: "If you do not accept it we go out of office." That is the position the Ministry asks us to take. I say this is a reasonable proposal. If a regulation is made and laid before the Dáil it should not be put up to us that the only alternative is to defeat or pass it. Surely we ought to have a right to consider it and to amend it.