I welcome the Minister to the House and I welcome the Bill. I was unaware of the Bill until I came across it and my eyes have been opened to the need for it. I am delighted we are not taking Report Stage today because even in the case of a Bill like this, which is welcome, I disagree with taking all Stages on the one day.
It was not until recently, when looking through the Intoxicating Liquor Bill, that I realised the need for this Bill. We are talking about 1904. When I queried something with the Minister, he corrected me by quoting section 3 of the 1927 Act, which turned out to be incorrect when examined, but that will be sorted out. I realised the need for restatement, for consolidation and for easier language.
I had a look last night at some of the problems and why definitions are created, not necessarily in legislation. I read an article which stated that 70% of employees in Europe were questioned as to whether they would accept less money for a changed title. That may explain why we some times use other words. Apparently a cleaner, if called an environmental technician, would be willing to work for less, and a tea lady, if called a catering supervisor, would be willing to work for less. There may well be reasons why, in other businesses and other places, words like that are used.
The biggest offender in this regard is not the parliamentary draftsman's office, although they may have got away with it in recent times. The European Commission is to blame for most of this. If it is desired to downgrade a civil servant, he becomes derepersonalised – a word I have not heard before, but apparently it is common. Another lovely one is that if a person is over somebody, he now has hierarchical authority. I can see where these words come in. The best of all was one from the Information Society Directorate which has a section called the "Integrated Management of Resources and Horizontal Questions". That is from Europe. We will not take responsibility for it other than keeping our eye on it.
I welcome the Bill as a long overdue step towards making our statute law more comprehensible and more accessible to the general body of our citizens, not just to those of us involved in the Legislature. If we are to have true democracy, we must have rule by law, but that law must be as simple as possible, as understandable as possible, and as accessible as possible. Few would argue that our lawmaking in this State has, up to now, passed muster in all or any of those respects. In inheriting a legal system from our colonial masters some 80 years ago, we unfortunately embraced some of its bad aspects as well as its good ones.
On the issue of accessibility, a major step forward was taken in 1998 with the publication on CD-ROM of all the statutes from 1922 to 1997 and the associated publication of those statutes on the Internet. I found it of huge benefit to be able to access them. When that first CD-ROM was published we were promised that it would be updated each year, but for some reason that I cannot understand this has not happened. As a result, the statutes for 1998 and 1999 are not yet available in electronic form, either in CD form or on the Internet. That is a gap which should be filled as a matter of urgency.
I hope that when the restatements envisaged by this Bill start to appear, they will be published electronically at the same time as on paper, and as part of the same integrated publishing operation, not as an afterthought that happens at some indeterminate later time. It is interesting that some Ministers make sure this happens every time, while in other Departments it seems to be done as an afterthought and only some time later. We now recognise that publication can be done in that manner and it is of huge benefit.
Making the statutes available electronically not only replaced whole shelves of volumes with a single CD, which was an obvious advantage, but the nature of the electronic medium made it much easier to follow up all those cross-references that we are trying to correct here. That is absolutely essential in a situation where we tend to legislate by repeatedly amending existing legislation. It is a very rare Act that is complete in itself without reference to other statutes.
We make this situation worse by an apparent reluctance to pass consolidation Acts, which bring together all the legislation on one topic that we have ever passed in the State. The only consolidation Bill that I can remember in my time in the Seanad is the Taxes Consolidation Act, 1997. I understand it is policy to consolidate Finance Acts every ten years.
There are many other areas where law would become more accessible if it were consolidated, for example, the raft of employment legislation that has been passed over the past 20 years, and more particularly in the past ten years. For small companies that do not have the luxury of a personnel department, compliance with all this legislation is made much more difficult because it is so fragmented and is scattered around in so many different pieces of legislation. If I understand the object of this Bill correctly, a major purpose of these restatements will be to provide that consolidation effect and, perhaps, a more practical way of satisfying that need than passing a whole raft of consolidation statutes.
I welcome the implicit recognition in this Bill that the language in our statutes can often be a barrier to understanding them. I hope, however, that the availability of this restatement avenue will not deflect the parliamentary draftsmen from the need always to search for simpler, clearer language when they are drafting original Bills. I agree with Senator Dardis who cited one or two examples, even from this Bill. It would be a retrograde step if they gave up on the need to make Bills clearer than they were before and used the excuse that plain and simple language is just for the restatement and that they can be as obscure and convoluted as they like in drafting Bills. The danger is that they might focus on the restatements and process new Bills in the way we have developed the habit of doing in recent times.
There is a need, which I am not sure is fully recognised within the legal profession – and maybe with the ulterior motive that Senator Dardis says – to update and modernise the language and the phrasing that is used in legal matters. I know the Attorney General thinks the same. Every profession has its own jargon, which is useful up to a point. However, in the case of the law, there is a need for a precision that goes far beyond the use of ordinary language. There is a natural temptation, which is not always resisted, to hide behind the legal jargon and to use it as a means of keeping lay people out of the professional area. I agree with Senator Dardis that there may be an ulterior motive. That is wrong and it springs from the misconception that the law belongs to the legal profession. In a democracy, the law should belong to the people. It should belong to the citizens, and the role of professional legal people should be as facilitators for the general body of citizens, not as high priests jealously guarding their sacred books.
We have not been given any examples of what a restatement might look like. It is hard to judge its potential effectiveness from the descriptions we have, in spite of the Minister's explanation. The proof of the effectiveness of this approach will be available only when the restatements begin to appear. I am inclined to be optimistic about the potential for communicating legal matters more clearly so that they are much more easily understood than they were before. One has only to look at the explanatory and financial memoranda that accompany new Bills. They are often models of clarity, and I have often wished we could pass the memorandum itself into law rather than the Bill to which it refers. Very often I do not look at the Bill until I have gone through that, and I wonder why we need the Bill at all.
I welcome not just the Bill in itself but what I take to be a new resolve to make our laws more accessible and more understandable, a resolve that will manifest itself in other ways, in addition to the restatements that will flow from this Bill. I believe the intention is there to achieve and that this wording will do it. I look forward to any amendment that may be made. Senator Manning has referred to his amendment and I am happy to support it.