With some reluctance we agree to this motion. We should be thankful at this stage to the Government for small mercies. Four months after the setting up of the Government, two months after the election of this House, we now see very small signs of a committee system emerging. I want to register the enormous disappointment of my party and our sense of impatience at the very truncated list of committees which has emerged here today. Of the five committees included today two have no bearing whatsoever on legislation.
The Joint Services Committee is important but it is concerned merely with housekeeping duties here in the House. The Irish language committee is a worthy committee but it is mainly concerned with encouraging the use of spoken Irish in both Houses of the Oireachtas. It has no function as far as the scrutiny of legislation is concerned, or for making proposals for legislation. It is not, in the strictest sense, a parliamentary committee.
At long last we have three real Joint Committees. All are welcome. I welcome especially the Joint Committee on the Secondary Legislation of the European Communities which was, Members would agree, the most hardworking committee in the last Oireachtas. Overall, it produced over 45 reports, many of them on major issues, including European union, the Single European Act, acid rain and a very wide variety of agricultural issues. The committee had a very significant Seanad participation. I hope that tradition will be continued in the new committee.
I should like to ask the Leader of the House and, through him, the Government, what of the other major committees of the last Oireachtas. The small businesses committee was excellent. Under Deputy Ivan Yates it produced a series of major reports and it was brimful of positive ideas for the improvement and development of small businesses. Surely Members would agree there is a need for a committee like this, indeed, a new committee with its base broadened out to encourage ideas on enterprise and employment and to provide access to the Oireachtas for people in the wide community who have ideas on these matters.
Members will be shocked to see the absence of any committee on development aid. In the last Oireachtas there was a vigorous joint committee chaired by former Senator Nora Owen. It raised the profile of development aid throughout the entire country and it established very good relations with those countries with which we have bilateral aid arrangements. It also had a very important educational function, both within this House and outside, in bringing to public attention an increasing awareness of Third World issues. Are we to assume that the Government have no interest whatsoever in development aid? Are we to assume that the proud record of the last committee is to be totally abandoned?
What of that most vocal, if not the most substantial of the committees of the last Oireachtas, that on crime, lawlessness and vandalism? It is extraordinary that, at a time when huge questions are being raised about every aspect of our legal system, about the efficiency and the effectiveness of the courts, restrictive practices among lawyers, the public accountability of lawyers and judges, Garda procedures and the prison service, when every day all of these major questions are being discussed by the public at large, this committee is being abandoned. Surely, the time has come for a much more broadly based committee on law reform and law enforcement. Surely that is the least we could ask for at this stage.
The most depressing thing about this list of committees which the Leader of the House has given us here this afternoon is not just that the Government are cutting back on the reform of the Oireachtas, which was such an important part of the programme of the last Government, but that they have no ideas of their own. Do the Government really want to get the best out of us here in the Oireachtas? It hardly appears so from this list of cutbacks we have been given, a list as badly thought out as the cutbacks we have seen taking place in health, social welfare and education.
Surely we could ask whether the Government have some ideas of their own so far as Oireachtas reform is concerned. We in this House spent the past few weeks in very fruitful debate and many ideas emerged as to how we could better reform ourselves. Surely we have a right to ask the Government to come forward with some distinctive ideas of their own on how this House and the overall Oireachtas could be made more effective. Surely we have a right to ask for the setting up of some select committees where, over the course of the summer recess ideas for legislation could be teased out, where outside voices could be heard, where Members of the Oireachtas could be seen to have some sort of overall input into the framing of our laws.
This side of the House will demand that this paltry offering of committees be at least in place by the beginning of the summer recess, that these committees have a full programme of work for the summer recess, that the Government come forward before the end of this session with specific thought out ideas for the detailed setting up of committees, so that the ideas expressed in this House over the past few weeks about the need for a more vigorous participation in the whole work of the Oireachtas can become a reality and that we will be seen by the public and by ourselves to be serious about the whole business of making the Oireachtas work.