Amendment No. 13 seeks to do a number of things but basically it seeks to write into this Bill the setting-up of a committee of the Dáil which would have the power to examine and advise the Minister on proposals that are before the Council of Ministers and which will be decided on in the future. There is not much point in having a discussion here on any matter that has been decided already and which, therefore, cannot be affected by any such discussion. What is really valuable is that Members of this House should bring to bear on matters that have not been decided their knowledge of the effects on their constituents of any proposed legislation. What I am suggesting is consistent with Deputy Tully's suggestion, that is, that we should create a committee which would be in a position to examine all draft directives coming from the Community. There are a vast number of draft directives covering a great many technical matters. I am proposing that these should be examined in detail by a committee of this House. Such committee should have available to it the best possible technical advice so that the committee, possibly with sub-committees, would be in a position to examine in detail draft proposals and how they would affect Irish law as well as affect the constituencies of the Deputies concerned. The committee would be able to give to the Minister an informed opinion which would enable him to participate more effectively in the discussions of the Council of Ministers at which a final decision would be taken.
One of the great strengths that a Minister can rely on in any negotiations with the Council of Ministers is to be able to say to his colleagues there: "Unless you can give me this, I shall have great difficulty in justifying the position to my people at home." If there has been no advance discussion on a particular proposal the Minister would not be able to say that with much force. Obviously his hand would be strengthened if he could produce the deliberations of a Dáil committee referring to certain difficulties that might arise in relation to the implementation of any proposal.
Such a committee, too, would serve to educate Deputies on what is going on in the EEC and would enable them to give greater advice and assistance to their constituents. Also, when the implementing legislation is going through they would be better able to participate usefully in suggesting the implementing regulations.
Another point that is important is that the type of committee I envisage, and which would operate directly on the Irish members of the Council of Ministers, would bring a democratic voice into the legislative processes of the Community, a voice which at present is lacking. The European Parliament is not elected directly by the people. It is elected indirectly. It has only consultant powers. The ten Irish members will have to spend, perhaps, half the year away from this country. Therefore they will not be as much in touch with their constituents as would the members who spend almost all of the year here. If this proposal is accepted we will be able to supplement our membership of ten in the European Parliament by having the views of those Deputies who are resident in the country for the greater part of the year brought to the attention of the ten members who in turn, will bring their views to the Commissioner who, ultimately, will be the man to make the decision on behalf of this country. This would strengthen the process and would bring into the legislative machinery a greater number of people who are elected directly.
Perhaps Deputy Tully will correct me if I am wrong but if I understand his amendment it is to ensure that there must be advance consultation with this House and with the Seanad in regard to any regulations which the Minister proposes to make in implementing the regulations. I do not think that goes far enough because what the Deputy is proposing is that after a decision has been taken in principle in Brussels the Irish Minister must consult this House when he comes to implement that proposal by means of regulations. My proposal is that not only must the House be consulted before then but that it must be consulted before any Community decision has been reached in Brussels. The setting-up of a committee would be the means of implementing that proposal. It is clear that every draft directive emanating from the EEC could not be discussed here across the floor of the House; that would take an enormous amount of time and money and many of the provisions that would be considered would contain matters that might not have any great implications for this country.
Therefore I believe this function, which is a very detailed and technical one but nevertheless a very important one, could best be dealt with by means of a committee. That committee must have fairly wide powers. It must have a substantial secretariat which will automatically be able to bring every proposal before the committee in translation and also provide it with a memorandum on the basic effects of proposals on Irish law, spelling out what statutes are likely to be affected by any draft proposal which is before the Council of Ministers. On the basis of that memorandum which the committee would receive they would be able to invite the Minister to come and explain his attitude to the proposal.
It is important that this committee should not rely for its interpretation of the implications of a particular EEC proposal on the official version coming from the Department of the Minister concerned. It must also have an independent secretariat of its own which could produce its own interpretation which would equip the committee members to debate on equal terms with the Minister any interpretation he might have. This is something this House has lacked for many years and something which this committee should have if it is to deal with this very technical matter of EEC legislation.
It will be necessary to have a very large committee because EEC legislation covers a huge area. If we have a committee of 14 or 15 people, we are unlikely to get enough people who will be specialists in each particular area or we might have only one man who is a specialist, say, on fisheries legislation, and in that situation the committee would have to rely on that man only. What we would need is a reasonably large basic committee, with subcommittees considering, broadly speaking, the areas of each Department and submitting its opinion to the committee itself.
There are a number of other problems which will need to be decided upon in regard to any committee we set up. One of them is to what extent the committee should be in private, to what extent it could require the Minister to appear before it. I believe it should have the power to require the Minister to appear before it. It is very important that that power should not be used frivolously. In the EEC Ministers will have a greater burden of work than they have at the moment and it would not be fair to be asking them to appear before the committee all the time. However, they must have that power and it must be used responsibly. It should also have the power to call officials before it, to call outside evidence.
Deputy Haughey raised another important point yesterday in relation to committees. He said such a committee would diminish the effectiveness of the House in that every member would not be able to put his view to it. I think that could be got around if it were given as a right to any Member of the Oireachtas to make an oral submission to the committee in relation to any directives and if, during the period that his oral submission in regard to directives was being discussed, he would be present to give his views on the matter. This right of audience for Members of the House in committees of the House of which they themselves are not members is not without precedent. I understand it operates in the American Congress and it would get around Deputy Haughey's objection to committees.
Deputy Haughey seemed to suggest that this work should be done by a committee of the whole House on Fridays. I am sure he is aware of the volume of Community legislation and the detail into which it sometimes goes, and also of the fact that a draft may be published at one stage by the Commission and before any final decision is taken that draft may be altered a number of times. There would be grave difficulties involved in discussing that on the floor of the House. Would you have to bring the matter before the House a second time if, before a decision was taken, the draft had been altered in some minor respect? I do not think it would be practical to adopt the procedure of having the whole House consider this matter. A relatively informal committee with a specialised secretariat would be able to deal with this matter more efficiently and, as I suggest, all Members of the House could be allowed to make a submission or give evidence on a particular directive which would be before the committee at the time. This committee should also publish a report every year, or maybe more often, on its deliberations, on its contact with the Minister, on whether or not a particular recommendation to a Minister had been accepted.
I can see that there will be certain difficulties in regard to the operation of these committees. The main one is that the Minister will hold all the cards. If he is being asked to justify the fact that a particular proposal accepted by the EEC was not in the terms in which the committee of the House wished it he would be able to say: "I am the only person who was there at the Council of Ministers. I am the only person who knows exactly how the powers lay within the committee. I am the only person who can say what attitude each other member of the Council adopted. Therefore I am the only person who can say whether or not it was possible to get a particular proposal which reflected the view of the committee accepted by the Council." That is a constraint we shall have. Again perhaps the Minister will not want to disclose or possibly will not be able to disclose the attitude adopted by other members of the Council of Ministers, even to a committee of the House. This will restrict the debate to some degree. However, it is important that the Minister should be bound to disclose his position to the committee, should be prepared to explain how he acted on behalf of Ireland. The Minister is acting as a Member of this House on the Council of Ministers and the Government of which he is a member is responsible to this House. While he may not be able to give details about every other Minister, he should at least give details to such a committee of the attitude he adopted so that the committee can establish whether or not he has been doing his job.
The procedure I am envisaging is not at all without precedent within the European Community, and this is something to which I referred last night. The German Bundestag, when it was doing what we are doing today, namely, ratifying the European Communities legislation in 1958, inserted a clause into the Act which bound the Government to communicate projected EEC decisions to the Bundestag prior to a decision being taken on them so that the Bundestag could express its view on them. What has happened I understand is that when the President of the Bundestag receives from the Government a particular draft directive which is proposed he refers it to a committee of the House which will then be able to go into it, tease it out and see how it affects existing German practice and advise the Minister as to the line he might consider taking on the matter.
It is important to realise the great complexity of EEC legislation and the fact that our fellow parliamentarians in Europe have the benefit of a very comprehensive and well-developed committee system which can go into, in much greater detail, any legislative proposal, whether it be European or national, than can this House: a committee can obviously tease out matters much better than a forum such as this in which we are bound by certain procedures. In setting up a committee to deal with European affairs we would be, I think, taking a necessary step to redress the balance vis-à-vis parliamentarians in Europe who have already available to them a committee system, which is, to my mind, a more effective check on the activities of Ministers than is our present procedure here.
It is, of course, vitally important that the committee and the fact that it exists is not interpreted by the Ceann Comhairle, or anyone else, as in any way justifying a diminution of the rights of Members to raise EEC matters here by the existing procedures. Members must have the right to put down parliamentary questions on EEC matters and the right to have a debate on the Adjournment, should that be necessary, on these parliamentary questions. That right must be preserved quite independently of a committee being set up. This is something to which Deputy Flanagan referred; it is imperative that existing rights should not be eroded; it is vital that whatever we do should not be allowed to justify any diminution of existing safeguards.
My amendment is constituted of three parts. So far, I have dealt with one, namely, the provision that:
( ) Any Committee referred to in the foregoing subsection shall have power
(a) to examine and advise a Minister of State and Irish Members of the European Parliament on all EEC Commission proposals prior to decisions thereon being taken by the Council of Ministers, and...
There are two other provisions in the amendment. The one I have just quoted relates to draft proposals which have not been agreed by the Council of Ministers. The other two proposals relate to the implementation of matters already agreed by the Council of Ministers but, in relation to which, it is still open to the Government to implement them in a particular way and the Government are given a certain freedom as to the way in which an agreed decision may be implemented. These are basically directives of the EEC. First of all, my amendment proposes that the decision as to whether or not a particular directive shall be implemented by means of a regulation, a procedure which does not allow for the same degree of public debate, or by means of legislation, which makes for great public scrutiny, shall not be a matter for the Government because, quite clearly, the Government and civil servants, naturally enough, will want only the minimum inconvenience in implementing EEC proposals. They will not want every line of their proposals to be scrutinised here and they will, therefore, tend towards wanting to implement directives by means of regulation rather than by legislation which could be publicly debated here.
The protection in this regard is very weak. The Taoiseach, when introducing the Bill, said that a Minister of State may make regulations for enabling section 2 of this Bill to have full effect and he also said that some directives are more important than others and it may be that it will be found desirable in a particular case to implement by statute Community legislation which might not be directly applicable. It may be that it will be found desirable to implement it by statute and it may be that it will not be desirable to implement it by statute. Who will find it desirable or otherwise? The Minister. He will be the person to decide whether or not he will have the inconvenience of introducing a particular matter here by legislation or merely implementing it by regulation which nobody may possibly discuss at all. He will be the person who will decide whether he himself will have to go to this trouble.
Quite clearly, this is giving this power to an interested party, to someone who will want to minimise personal inconvenience and, because of that, he will reduce the extent to which debate can take place here on the precise implementation of directives, directives in relation to which the Government may have quite a degree of freedom as to the manner in which they will be implemented. My amendment proposes that the decision as to whether or not a particular directive is important enough to warrant implementation by legislation should not be a decision for a particular Minister but rather a decision for a committee of this House. It is important that this should be accepted. Where it is decided by this committee that the matter shall be done by regulation rather than by legislation, there might be, as I said, considerable leeway for the Government as to the way in which they may implement a particular directive. In the case of directives with regard to farm structures the Government may be free not to implement a certain directive at all in certain parts of the country; they might be free to vary the terms of the scheme introduced under the directive in relation to different regions. They might, for instance, be able to give a higher rate of grants for the keeping of farm accounts in the west than they do in the south.
This is something left to the Irish Government. This is not something laid down in Brussels. Quite clearly, the Government will have a very wide area of discretion and, since the Government are responsible to this House, it is important that the way they exercise this discretion should be amenable to discussion in this House. My first proposal is that the manner of implementation should be decided by the committee and will obviously be gone into in great detail. Suppose the committee say that the directive may be implemented by regulation, the present proposal in regard to such regulations is, to my mind, without precedent. The existing procedure for regulations is that any Member of this House may seek to have any regulation annulled within 21 days and, as a matter of right, he is given Government time to have that motion for annulment discussed. That is an important protection of the rights of Members in regard to the exercise of ministerial power in the making of regulations. The Bill before the House proposes to take away that power and, if I understand the provision correctly, there has to be a recall of the Dáil during the recess to have these regulations discussed. There is no provision in regard to the 21 days' motion for annulment. The provision in the Bill reads:
If when regulations under this Act are made, or at any time thereafter and before the regulations are confirmed or cease to have statutory effect, Dáil Éireann stands adjourned for a period of more than ten days and if, during the adjournment, a majority of the members of Dáil Éireann by notice in writing to the Ceann Comhairle require Dáil Éireann to be summoned, the Ceann Comhairle shall summon Dáil Éireann to meet on a day named by him being neither more than twenty-one days after the receipt by him of the notice nor less than ten days after the issue of the summons.
In order, therefore, to get a particular regulation discussed, not only has one to raise the matter during the recess but also — possibly I am wrong in my interpretation here—one has to have a majority of the Dáil behind one. There is nothing in this Bill which says that regulations made under it shall be subject to the normal procedure in respect of annulment, which provides the power for a motion of annulment within 21 days. I believe the original procedure is itself an inadequate protection because it only allows a motion to annul the regulation: you have to reject the regulation in toto or you are not allowed to discuss the matter at all. Many regulations may be brought before the House in pursuance of EEC directives which, while generally all right, may require amendment in regard to specific provisions. Clearly we could not have this House amending those regulations in a way which would be inconsistent with the original directive of the Community. If a Member wished to put down an amendment to modify a particular regulation there would obviously have to be some mechanism for deciding whether or not that amendment was inconsistent with the basic Community directive and therefore impossible.
I am proposing that these committes of the Dáil which I suggest be set up should be given power to decide whether a particular proposed amendment of a regulation is inconsistent with the basic directive and if it is, obviously the amendment will fall. It is important that that decision should not be a matter for the Minister who might have an interest in getting it through but it should be a matter for an organ of the House in which all parties would be represented. It is also important to recognise an important distinction made in this amendment vis-à-vis the existing procedure in regard to regulations, that this amendment proposes that Members of the House shall be free to amend regulations. At present you may not discuss a regulation made unless you are prepared to have it annulled in toto. To my mind, that is not adequate, you must have power to amend it.
So far as I know, that is the position but I see Deputy Haughey shaking his head. I am not experienced in these matters and I may be wrong. It is important that we should discuss proposals made by the EEC prior to a decision being taken on them by the Council of Ministers. It is not much use coming in, as this Bill proposes, and having a global Bill implementing everything that has happened in the past 12 months, or something like that. Such a discussion would be quite unreal, just as unreal as it is at the moment in regard to many regulations which have already gone through. We require a procedure for discussing draft regulations and draft directives before a final decision has been taken so that this House can have an influence on the position ultimately adopted by the Minister at the Council of Ministers when the decision is actually being taken.