During Report Stage concern was expressed that the House had not sufficient opportunity to consider in detail the amendments that were made by the Dáil to this Bill since it was passed by Seanad Eireann. I appreciate the concern and in my address to the House and in the course of that debate, I endeavoured to explain as clearly as possible the substance of the various amendments and undertook to try to furnish any additional explanations that any Member of the House might find necessary. I now repeat that undertaking and I hope that Senators will find it possible to agree with me that the Bill has been considerably improved. If, for any reason, any Senator feels unable to agree with a particular provision in the Bill, I trust he will accept my assurance that every provision has received the most careful consideration and every argument raised for and against it, has been thoroughly examined. Sometimes where things are neither black nor white and a balance of advantage and disadvantage is involved, there is room for legitimate differences of opinion as to where a particular line should be drawn. To the extent that that applies, it would be illusory to suppose that we could all agree about all the provisions. Perhaps we can agree that the contribution that the Seanad has made to the Bill has been a most useful one, even if the results of that contribution did not appear until the Bill had come before the other House.
Senator Molony referred to the Dáil amendment of section 13 (2) which had the effect of deleting the word "unforeseen" from the subsection. As I explained in my introductory remarks on Report Stage, this amendment of section 13 (2) was possible only because the prior amendment of section 13 (1) (a) which now imposes a separate requirement on a tenant as to the occupation and as to the business use for the purpose of acquiring rights under the Bill. As a result of that redrafting of section 13 (1) (a), a pre-arranged break in occupation or tenancy for the purpose of ensuring that a particular letting remains outside the scope of the Bill will still be possible. At the same time, under section 13 (2), as amended, any break in business use, provided occupation is continuous, may be disregarded by the court if the court considers it reasonable to disregard it. Again, it all hinges on the consideration that whereas one cannot use a tenement without occupying it, one can certainly occupy a tenement and not use it for business purposes. We can see, therefore, that section 13 (2) now caters precisely for the type of temporary break that the Landlord and Tenant Commission recommended should be catered for, that is genuinely unexpected and temporary breaks in the tenement caused by factors such as fire or storm damage, illness and so on. At the same time, a planned break in the occupation of the tenement, that is a break in the tenancy, cannot be regarded by the court as such a break does not come within the scope of section 13 (2). It is important to be quite clear that section 13 (2), as amended, is a re-enactment of the existing law as it has been interpreted by the courts. In the case of the Gatien Motor Company Ltd. v. Continental Oil Company of Ireland Limited, the Supreme Court held in its judgment, delivered in April 1979, that planned breaks in tenancies in order that rights under the landlord and tenant code should not accrue are permissible. In other words, the existing landlord and tenant code permits of contracts being made outside that law. Section 13 (2), as amended, represents no change in the law as it is. Therefore, it merely makes more explicit the expression of that law in the Statute Book.
I would like to conclude by sincerely thanking Senator Molony for his words of welcome to the House.
