There is outstanding legislation on the agenda. The Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud) Bill, 2000, the Solicitors (Amendment) Bill, 1998, the Proceeds of Crime (Amendment) Bill, 1999, and the European Convention on Human Rights Bill, 2001, are not completed and there are submissions yet to come in on the last of those. The clerk has suggested that if the Minister were available next week we would be able to do some committee work on that legislation.
Business of Select Committee.
Acting Chairman
I would like to get some shape on the legislative proposals. You may have heard me raise this issue on the Order of Business on the past two days. The Taoiseach has told us that 36 Bills are coming from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform. The most urgent ones are not yet published. They are the ones coming from the Justice and Home Affairs Council and involve the ratification of important international conventions to combat terrorism. There will be at least five Bills in that package and there may be as many as seven. I do not know how many will be published before Christmas, nor does the Minister. There are also three other Bills to be published before Christmas and there are outstanding Bills before the Select Committee. We need to shape the workload we intend to deal with. The Minister spoke to me about sitting on Fridays to deal with this. I have committed to the new forum on Europe on Thursdays and it will occasionally meet on Mondays so short of abandoning my constituency entirely in the run-up to the general election——
The Deputy is a safe candidate.
I am not keen on Fridays. To prepare for what will happen between now and June - June being the time limit to this Dáil - would it be possible for the chair, the deputy chair or Deputy McGennis in the chair' s absence, to sit on other days? I cannot deal with 36 Bills at the same time so I would like to know which Bills will come before us and in what sequence. That would be very helpful to me and others.
Acting Chairman
On behalf of the committee, I send our best wishes to the Chairman, Deputy Ardagh. I will speak with Deputy McGennis about the matter. A further matter we need to deal with is the outstanding submissions on the convention, which is time-consuming in terms of the time we have to make available to thepeople making submissions. I agree with Deputy Howlin, we need some form of timetable or prioritising.
We will not cover any more than half a dozen Bills.
Did we agree before the summer recess that we had drawn a line under the presentations on the Human Rights Commission?
Acting Chairman
Yes, that is agreed. The clerk will write to the Minister about the matter.
We should go and see the Minister instead.
Will the Chairman put a question through to the Department?
That is a private conversation.
No, it is not. This is getting back to my constituency.
The Dáil will not sit next week. I have a parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday morning and a further function in the afternoon. I am committed to being in Laois-Offaly on Thursday and have another meeting in Dublin on Friday. I then have an executive meeting of the Labour Party on Saturday, so arranging a meeting next week will be very difficult.