I want to make what has become a traditional intervention on this section. I cannot see why we need this section in the Bill at all. It provides that a certain procedure shall be followed for orders to be made under this Bill with the exception of orders to be made under section 1 (2). Section 1 (2) concerns the date on which the various parts of the Act come into operation and the Minister is entitled to specify those dates as an executive function. He does not need any further specification in the Bill.
As far as I can determine there are only two other sections in the Bill which provide for orders to be made; one in section 15 where the orders allow the Minister to specify which States are, or are not, fulfilling their obligations under certain conventions and the other is section 66 which allows the Minister to make regulations for the burial of bodies at sea. I may be wrong but I cannot find any other case in the Bill where orders are to be made.
This section blandly provides this iniquitous procedure under which orders are laid before the Houses of the Oireachtas, come into effect immediately and cannot be annulled except by a decision of the Houses of the Oireachtas within 21 sitting days. I object to the blanket use of that order procedure. There are a number of orders which should require a conscious decision and a debate by the Houses of the Oireachtas before they would come into force.
I hasten to add that that is not the case with any of the other orders provided for in this Bill. I cannot imagine that the Houses of the Oireachtas would wish to detain themselves for very long over any regulations the Minister might wish to make governing the burial of bodies at sea. I am not saying that is not a traumatic event, but it does not seem to be a matter of major political importance. I would like the Minister to bear this in mind in his contacts with colleagues in Government. I would invite members of the Labour Party, which claims to be democratic, and of Fianna Fáil, which says it is slightly constitutional, to reflect on the iniquity of this procedure.
On the one occasion that I can remember where an order came before the Houses of the Oireachtas under a similar provision — and this happened quite recently in the environment field — there was a legitimate objection to something that was provided for in the order. What happened? This Fianna Fáil-Labour Government, supposedly open and democratic, would not allow parliamentary time to debate an amendment to the order. We saw for the first time in practice the iniquity and the totally anti-democratic nature of the procedure for making orders that is included in this Bill and that keeps coming before us in Bill after Bill.
The only reason the procedure is put in that way is that our administrative structure never bothers to think about the appropriate way of making this kind of order. Every kind of order will be rushed through in the most convenient way for the Government. That brings us to the point where the Government of the day would simply not allow parliamentary time to take the kind of action this section envisages. We see the full stupidity and the anti-democratic nature of these orders. I am not complaining about any of the orders we made in this Bill but I will keep on raising it on any Bill which makes a similar provision until we get action from our Government and our Administration.
