I understand Senator Harte's point of view, but I am supporting this amendment because of a certain attitude of mind. This amendment, although I disagree entirely with the whole section, is a logical conclusion to the section as it stands. What the amendment purports to do is to bring into a meaningless section a penalty clause. You do not, in my view, in any form of legislation take a particular stance or decision in a section of the law unless, side by side with that, you have a penalty. That is what legislation is all about in any parliament. You bring in a law; you advance certain provisions and, if people break those provisions, and act in an unlawful manner then penalties are imposed. There is a logic in this amendment. What I object to is aspirational or pietistic legislation. You do not write morality into legislation. There is no point in section 6 telling people to stop writing letters to Garda Superintendents, State Solicitors, Directors of Public Prosecutions or Attorneys General; you do not put that into an Act of Parliament. That would be a joke. It would be making a joke of the whole parliamentary process. There is a big education job needed among parliamentarians as to what we are doing here. We are preparing positive proposals. We had enough trouble last night as to what we are all about here; what we should be at here is preparing positive proposals, and, if people break those proposals, then there are sanctions and penalties imposed. That is where the logic of this amendment lies. You just do not say, as I said here, on section 6 that it is unlawful to write letters.
I said, in an interjection earlier on, that there is nothing against the telephone being picked up, a far more diabolical way of inducing influence than any writing of letters. All you have here is a series of aspirations. There is no point in writing the ten Hail Marys into a section of a statute of a sovereign democratic parliament. That is another day's work. We all say the ten Hail Mary's in our own time, but we do not write them into a section of an Act. There is a great deal of waffle here or, as ex-Deputy Dillon used to say, a lot of codswallop, written into section 6. It means nothing. It is absolute codology. It is an aspiration that people should not write letters to people. The section dealing with the appointment and the screening process is excellent. But here, after appointing a man of the utmost integrity and capacity, we suggest he should be asked to seek out people who write letters. We all know that people write letters. We all know it is almost impossible to stop Irish people writing letters. Thanks be to God for the democratic process in that respect. It may be burdensome and annoying but, so long as a man of integrity, when appointed, knows how to shift and make decisions in accordance with his own standards of integrity, that is fine but we just do not write it into legislation and make puerile idiots of ourselves with regard to a most important piece of legislation. I just do not understand the need for writing this nonsense into section 6. From the point of view of democracy and the high standards of those whom we appoint to offices of importance of this kind, we do not have aspirations of this kind written into legislation Senator Yeats's amendment is absolutely right in that, if people wish to write in matters of that kind, then they should be pursued to the full logical conclusion and penalties should be imposed and particular sanctions should be written in. I shall say no more because the Minister may possibly have a closed mind in the matter.
