I was speaking earlier on the five amendments put forward by representatives of all four Opposition parties. I was saying that the acceptance of any of these amendments, not distinguishing between them, would remove in greater or lesser degree the objection I see to the form of section 2 as it stands. I will briefly trace the history of the legislative technique which we have been seeing in this House in the small number of years since the second last election. We have in front of us a Bill which proposes to place at the disposal of the Taoiseach not an amazing sum of money measured by the scale of the national budget but nevertheless a substantial enough sum. I absolutely accept without question that the ministerial statement this morning indicating a destination for this money is sincere and genuine and that that is exactly where the money will go, but I have to protest, as other speakers have done, about the failure to put that in simple form in the Bill itself. That seems to offend against both the letter and the spirit of Articles 11 and 17 of the Constitution. I want to contrast that technique that has been seen here in recent years.
Infamous though the results of the National Lottery Act seem to have turned out to be, at least that Act made some pathetic, rudimentary gesture towards indicating some general purposes for which the money would ultimately be applied. The technique is that there is a lottery fund under the control of the Minister. The lottery fund, at the end of a particular period when the payments have been established, can be paid into the central fund. Section 5 of the National Lottery Act, 1986, states:
Moneys paid into the Central Fund pursuant to section 8 of this Act shall be applied for—
(a) the purposes of such one or more of the following, and in such amounts, as the Government may determine from time to time, that is to say, sport and other recreation, national culture (including the Irish language), the arts (within the meaning of the Arts Act, 1951) and the health of the community, and
(b) such (if any) other purposes, and in such amounts, as the Government may determine from time to time.
Of course, subsection (b) destroys the whole principle but at least lip service of some kind is being paid to the principle that the Dáil and Seanad should specify what this money, raised on their authority, is to be devoted to.
That does not remove the objection I voiced this morning to the creation of two tiers of revenue and two tiers of destination. It is scandalous that overseas development aid should have to lean on the national lottery. I am sorry to say that this puts it to some extent in the same category as a lawn tennis club or a golf club. It is depending on the same secondary source of funding. It implicitly devalues it to the status of something which the State will find a few pence for if it can. It puts it in the realm of State funding which is inferentially of the second rank compared with paying our salaries, for example. No one suggested that our salaries should depend on the national lottery's product. Nevertheless, with all those objections which can be made to it, the National Lottery Act as recently as two years ago still pointed out in some kind of way the sort of area to which the funds were to be devoted — sport, national culture and the health of the community.
If we go back only another two years to 1984 we come to another windfall Act which should have been incorporated for collective citation purposes today. I refer to the Funds of Suitors Act, 1984. It is barely four years since it was enacted. The House knows what funds of suitors are. Basically, large lumps of money accumulate in the High Court, paid in connection with this or that case, and they are never ultimately paid out. Payments never keep up with the volume of money coming in. When the first such distribution of surplus funds was made about 20 years ago, naturally accompanied by a State guarantee that if ever the funds should prove inadequate to meet claims upon them, they would be supplemented by the Exchequer, it was made from a fund which had been accumulating since the 1780s. The first payment into the fund which was recognisable had been made in the reign of George III. That little source of revenue having once been tapped, it quickly built up and has been tapped again. As recently as 1984 we authorised the removal of money from the funds of suitors in the High Court and we directed in the most specific way what was to happen to those funds. I will not quote the whole of section 3(2) of the Funds of Suitors Act, 1984, but I will summarise the heads. It reads:
(2) The sums paid to the Exchequer pursuant to subsection (1) of this section may be applied by the Minister as follows:
(a) not more than £600,000 may be applied for such purpose or purposes in relation to culture and the arts...
(b) not more than £600,000 may be applied in or towards the defrayal of the cost of carrying out the works specified in section 4 of this Act,
which largely consisted in renovating the Kings Inns buildings, Library and gardens,
(c) not more than £300,000 may... be applied in or towards the defrayal of the cost of the extension ... of the premises of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann at Monkstown ...
carrying the curious name Cultúrlann na hÉireann and inviting the reflection that any culture which can think up a word like "cultúrlann" needs its credentials closely inspected,
(d) not more than £100,000 may, on the application of the Minister for Labour be applied in or towards the defrayal of the cost of the Community, Youth, Recreational and Employment Programme administered by the Minister for Labour,
and paragraph (e) set the balance that was to be applied for the maintenance in proper order of court premises — the Dublin Metropolitan District Court and the Children's Court.
We saw fit, admittedly under a very different kind of Government, wobblying and ineffective though it may have been in several respects, to maintain a certain standard in this kind of context.