Amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1 states:
To delete "£40,000,000" and substitute "£33,000,000".
I fully accept what the Minister said in relation to the difference between voted and non-voted expenditure and I also acccept his proposition that it would be an over-simplification to say that all expenditure has to be the subject matter of an Estimate approved by the Dáil. However, in terms of non-voted expenditure which is authorised for payment by Statute out of the Central Fund, apart from the 1984 Act to which the Minister referred, I cannot think of any Act which has been considered and passed by the House which has authorised moneys to be paid out of the Central Fund without limit. Perhaps one exists but I do not know of it.
Even in cases such as Land Acts, semi-State bodies and so on, we always fix upper limits and that was the case in relation to the obligations of the State in relation to export credit guarantees. We also fix upper limits in regard to the State's authority to capitalise semi-State companies. We do so for a very good constitutional reason, that this House does not give unlimited authority to anybody to do anything. Otherwise, at any stage in this House, we could authorise the Minister for Finance, without limit, to fund the Agricultural Credit Corporation as he thought fit. If that principle was admitted, if the House could simply adopt measures of this kind, we could give up any pretence at control of public expenditure. There is no such thing as non-voted expenditure under a Statute, with the exception of the 1984 Act. There is no precedent generally for the proposition that unlimited expenditure can be paid at the decision of the Government from the Central Fund.
All the precedents suggest that even to guarantee the loans of a semi-State body, to guarantee the repayment of the ACC's loan to investors and to guarantee the borrowings of various semi-State companies, we always fix an upper limit. If that is not necessary, why do we do it elsewhere? If it is necessary elsewhere, why are we not doing it here? To some extent this argument is futile because the Minister has set a limit. I will not press my amendment to a vote.
One of the irrelevancies to which the Minister's attention was drawn was the European Patents Convention. Deputy Bruton spoke about asking the EC to make a regulation requiring us to become signatories of the Patents Convention. He thought in that way it could become a necessitated obligation and that we would not have to have a referendum. That is all very well, but he forgets one fundamental fact. It is not part of the European Treaty and none of the other member states would ever allow the Commission to make a regulation of that kind because, if they got away with doing that once, making a regulation for the convenience of one member state to force them to take a step of this kind, then, in the last analysis, the British Government could be forced, for instance, to ratify a trade mark convention and someone else could be asked to ratify some totally different convention. Once we get away from the proposition that regulations can only be brought in on foot of what is now agreed to be the basis of the treaty, effectively the regulation-making process is an entirely sovereign one independent of the treaty on which it is founded. I am not lecturing Deputy Bruton on European law, I am giving him a lecture on basic politics. Mrs. Thatcher will never accept the right of the European Community to make regulations outside the ambit of the treaties. All the member states have a vested interest in making sure that no regulation is ever made outside the ambit of the treaties because, to do so, would be the slippery slope towards making the treaties themselves redundant.
The Minister should have specified a lesser amount than £40 million. In view of what he said in the intervening period about the letter coming from the Commission today specifying the final amount and that it is finally decided, I will not press the matter. However, I should like to make the point that the precedent to which Deputy Noonan referred, the fact that it came from a Fine Gael Minister in the past, is no reason to make the same mistake twice. Deputy Kelly, to be fair, said it was an unfortunate way of legislating. We should not regard it as a precedent but as an exception to an obvious rule. In future, we should decide that, in whatever form it comes before us, there should be a limit on it.