I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time. This Bill has certainly one quality to commend it. It is a very simple proposal. Under the Fatal Accidents Act, the relatives of the deceased person who seek to sue the tortfeasor for the death of their relative, were allowed, under the Statute commonly known as Lord Campbell's Act, 12 months from the date of the fatal accident wherein to sue. I think I am right in saying that if the deceased person had not been killed but had survived the accident he would himself have six years in which to sue the tortfeasor responsible for the accident in which he was injured.
Under the common law, when the victim of the accident was dead his dependents had no right of action because it was held that the deceased person's right of action dies with him. It was to remedy that defect that the Fatal Accidents Act of 1846 was passed. I am reliably informed that injustice has occasionally resulted from the limitation of one year which is now imposed on the dependents of the deceased person. I understand that the infrequent cases in which dependents have lost their right of action and gone without the compensation which they would have recovered if they had started proceedings within the statutory 12 months have been due, usually, to some confusion which has resulted in time slipping by, not infrequently as a result of no lack of diligence on the part of the claimant but, perhaps, through an oversight on the part of his advisers or her advisers or their advisers, as the case might be. I understand that the likelihood of such an important event transpiring would be rendered almost non-existent if the period in which they might initiate proceedings was extended from one year to two years.
I cannot imagine that this represents any revolutionary amendment of the Statute law as to call for the appointment of a law reform committee to require examination by judges, senior counsel and others. I am not nearly as much interested in what judges, lawyers, or anybody else thinks aboutit. I submit this for the consideration of my rational fellow-citizens in this House. Is it unreasonable to afford a widow-woman two years in which to get her action under way against tortfeasors responsible for the death of her husband, or should we, draconianlike, restrict her to one? I cannot see anybody suffering any loss. Ordinarily, bereaved people who have lost the wage earner will, by their circumstances, be driven at the earliest possible moment to appeal to the courts in order to get compensation for the loss they have endured, but a case does turn up from time to time in which, for the reasons to which I have referred, they do not manage to get started within the statutory 12 months and then they may be faced with a situation that the unfortunate widow, dependent child or persons of that kind, have lost their right of action altogether.
One can argue that there is no reason to extend the period from one year to two years, that people are as likely to be caught by the two-year rule as by the one-year rule. There is no argument in principle to counter such a claim but I am informed by those qualified so to speak that the extension would, in fact, remove every conceivable possibility of hardship arising.
I have been urged to incorporate in the Bill that I bring forward certain other reforms regarding the Fatal Accidents code, notably one of bringing within the category of dependents classes of persons whom it would appear equitable to bring within that category and which have not been provided for in Lord Campbell's law. I have deliberately forborne from attempting that degree of reform because I feel that it would have left me open to the comment by the Minister for Justice that this was going rather far afield and that we ought to have the matter examined by a law reform committee in order to ascertain its implications. I, therefore, resolved to keep my proposals within the narrowest possible limits so that, if possible, we could by-pass, swim under or fly over the customary mass of red tape which is employed in order to demonstrate that it is much better to do nothing at all.
I cannot conceive of any rational being saying that there could be any serious injury done by giving the widows or orphans two years instead of one in which to seek their remedy in a court of law. That is the full extent of my modest proposal set out in the Bill, and in the name of expedition and in the name of reviving the belief in the capacity of this Oireachtas to legislate according to its own discretion, I would suggest to the Minister that he accept this Bill and that we should be jointly a party to one of the greatest miracles since Moses struck the rock that we passed an Act of Parliament without permission of the Civil Service, the Treasury, the judiciary or any other vested interest, good, bad or indifferent, but simply and solely in the interests of Oireachtas Éireann and in the interests of nobody but the humbler citizens whom we all represent in this House.