The Electoral Law Reform Committee was in existence and the report was available when these Estimates were framed and, in fact, there is nothing whatever that should not have been estimated under the Electoral Law Report. There is, however, a perfectly good answer in respect of committees to which the Minister has not adverted. Most voluminous submissions were provided for the Health Committee of the House now sitting and required an enormous amount of printing that could not possibly have been foreseen when the Estimates were being prepared. I think the Minister must have got his committees slightly mixed at some stage in their progress to the brief.
However, I want to repeat observations I made on the Supplementary Estimate about six weeks ago in relation to certain printings which are now improved but which still require further improvement. Verbatim minutes of Committees of the House should be available to members of the various Committees more speedily. There has been a very considerable improvement—let me put it on record—since I raised this matter here in relation to the Health Committee a month or six weeks ago but there is still room for further improvement. The delay, perhaps, may arise because of the manner in which contracts are placed by the Stationery Office and because there is no provision in those contracts to ensure that verbatim reports of Committees of the House get appropriate priority. It is a matter of inserting the appropriate clause in the contract and making the necessary financial arrangements.
As I said in relation to the Houses of the Oireachtas Estimate, business of this type must be done in such a way that members of the House can do properly the job for which they were sent here by their constituents. The situation also about which we had a discussion earlier in regard to the printing and binding of volumes of debates of the Houses themselves is a matter that requires continuous pressure. I think when we discussed this on the token Estimate, the Minister for Finance suggested that my strictures should have been directed not at him but at you, Sir. Whether that be so or not, I shall leave it between the two of you. My only anxiety is to ensure that in general the volumes are available at an early date, particularly because of the index that is included in them. It is not much trouble for any of us to deal with the unrevised reports themselves but it makes the business of the House much more difficult if the index is not available at an early date and necessarily that index is available only in the bound volumes.
Therefore, I suggest to you, Sir, that you, as Ceann Comhairle and head of the administrative section in the House should direct your attention to that matter and also direct the attention of the Minister for Finance to the necessity for expeditious printing of these things in the hope that the shuffling—I do not use the word in any obnoxious sense—of responsibility between the Ceann Comhairle and the Minister may be ended in such a way that we will get what we want at a proper, early date.
