I am convinced of a conclusion other than Senator Cooney's except in relation to the delivering of unsolicited goods and the entries in directories which I hope are clearly criminal matters. With regard to the others, I have difficulty in agreeing with the Minister in his decision. Like Senator Cooney, I dislike any extension of the criminal law and we should be very careful of it. If we are having offences arising by virtue of displaying notices of the kind specified in subsection (2) why is it not an offence to display a notice excluding buyers of services from their rights under section 37? Why do we not have as an offence excluding the rights that persons will have under the next succeeding section of this Bill, where the Minister may make an order providing certain things about implied warranties with regard to spare parts and after sales service?
If it is an offence for a shop selling goods to tell customers that they are buying without the implied rights that they cannot have taken away from them, which are given to them under the Act, why is it not an offence for another provider to put up a notice saying that the persons who are taking the goods with the services under section 37 are not going to have the benefit of the implied terms that if I understand section 37 cannot be taken from them? Why is it an offence to put up a statement telling them that the goods are being sold without the implied terms but because something more, services as well as the goods, are sold it is not an offence to put up such a statement? Why is it not an offence in that case, if the Minister makes an order with regard to implied warranties in connection with spare parts and after care, to tell the customers that their rights are being excluded when their rights cannot be excluded? It seems to require an explanation and a reason for the distinctions being made in the treatment of the different sections conferring the different rights.
I invite Senators Molony and Cooney to look at the words. What does "to display on any part of any premises a notice that includes any such statement" mean? Does that mean if one puts it up in the kids' lavatory and one got it before the Bill was enacted that is a criminal offence? If one displays it in a television reel of the events of 1980 when this astonishing Bill was enacted, is that an offence? These are all premises. If one is a printer and one happens to be showing it to the customer who has ordered it is one not displaying the notice to him? In "any part of any premises"—surely we need a little more circumscription in the definition of the net which will catch people and put them in jail, or whatever will happen to them under the penalties section.
Here we are dealing with criminal law and we are amending the civil law in a manner which is not all that wrong, but it is common case among the Senators who have endeavoured to understand what we are doing that it is not easy to understand what we are doing and we cannot understand what we are doing unless we are the fortunate, in my case, borrowers of a little document called The Sale of Goods Act, 1893, which is published by Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Unless the Minister will tell us what alternative arrangements he is making for the provision on behalf of Her Majesty's Stationery Office of The Sale of Goods Act, 1893, we should at least, where we amend sections in that Act, repeat the sections we are amending, or where we are referring to sections which we are subjecting to amended provisions in this Bill we should repeat those sections. In this case, we are, for example, referring in our enactment of the law creating a series of offences to section 15 of the 1893 Act and it is only Her Majesty who will be able to give me an additional supply of copies of section 15. I am an extremely prudent man and I would not dare to risk making photostat copies of section 15 unless I was sure that I had the necessary permission to do so.
On section 22, we are all right but we have a little difficulty when we get to section 25 where we immediately have to chase off to section 61. If we are fortunate enough to be able to borrow a copy of the Sale of Goods Act, 1893, section 61(5) informs the commoners of this Republic that nothing in the Act shall prejudice or affect the landlords right of hypothec or sequestration for rent in Scotland. This might be a subsection that would get dropped out of a reenactment of section 61 which we are, incidentally, amending in section 23 or 24 of this Bill.
There is an amendment in section 61 somewhere here. Subsection (6) suddenly pops up in this Bill. We have to remember where we saw it which, of course, we will not do unless we read it from the beginning to the end. Then we have to carefully transcribe it into our copy of The Sale of Goods Bill, first striking out subsection (5) as not applicable and having done that we are meant to re-read section 55 which we will have to remember has been changed by this Bill. This is all very fine, but we are not able to press a button and produce all this stuff. Meanwhile the taximeter is charging and the customer is wondering why it is so hard to go to the pictures in Dublin. The reason is that we are not bothering to assist the people in the business of getting the taxi from one place to another, who are in fact the people in the business providing the professional service of telling people what their rights or their wrongs are, and are describing themselves as frightfully exhausted by the endeavour.
There is a chunk of the Sale of Goods Act that we should shove as much out of the window as we have done in other cases. I see no great problems. Why do we not have section 15 here? Section 15 also raises this matter that I mentioned the last day about sale by sample and the different language used in connection with such a sale from the language used when it is not a sale, for example. Why is it an offence to display statements, display notices, publish advertisements and supply goods with containers with statements, but it would not be an offence to do that if we were doing a building job for somebody? We could put anything we liked on the container with the goods, because this is not specifically provided in the section with regard to the services. The Minister, in relation to supplying goods as part of a contract for the supply of services, should not leave that matter in any doubt because we are dealing with a criminal matter that must be very expressly found in the section creating the criminal offence, particularly when we are dealing with the amendment of a code which only deals with the sale of goods, being the Sale of Goods Act. When section 11 is to be found in a Part which is related only to the sale of goods, why have it an offence in the one case and not have it expressly an offence in that other case where we are excluding buyers from rights that are given to them in the services section and where we are excluding them from rights that are given to them under the implied warranty section?
There is need for more careful use of the language with regard to premises. We should get these sections that are referred re-enacted even if we are not amending the very language.