Dáil Éireann díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 26 Mar 2025

Vol. 1064 No. 7

Statute Law Revision Bill 2024: Second Stage

Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform (Deputy Emer Higgins)

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I am pleased to be bringing the Statute Law Revision Bill 2024 to the House today. The Bill was introduced in the Seanad on 23 October 2024 and it passed Report and Final Stages in that House on 5 March this year. The Statute Law Revision Bill 2024 is the latest in a series of measures that have been enacted to modernise and improve public accessibility of the Statute Book and secondary legislation. It is vital that laws and regulations in Ireland are both fit for purpose and regularly reviewed and updated.

The statute law revision programme is Ireland’s national programme to identify obsolete and spent primary and secondary legislation and remove it from Ireland’s Statute Book. The purpose of the programme is to repeal legislation which has ceased to be in force due to change of circumstances or the passage of time and legislation which, while technically in force, is no longer of relevance in practice. There has been a particular need for such revision in Ireland because of our unique legislative past which has left us with a complex stock of legislation, with enactments from the Parliaments of Ireland, England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom as well as our own Oireachtas. The statute law revision programme is already responsible for six distinct but complementary Statute Law Revision Acts between 2005 and 2015, which have successfully repealed all obsolete primary legislation enacted prior to independence and, in addition, have revoked all obsolete secondary legislation made up to 1 January 1821. To date, more than 100,000 pieces of legislation and secondary instruments have been reviewed and either expressly or implicitly repealed under the programme. This Bill, when enacted, together with the six previous Statute Law Revision Acts, will collectively be the most extensive set of repealing measures in the history of the State and the most extensive set of statute law revision measures ever enacted anywhere in the world.

The benefits of statute law revision are well documented and include the creation of certainty as to which laws remain in force; the modernisation of the Statute Book; the enhancement of public accessibility to the Statute Book; and the codification or consolidation of the statute law of the State. It is in the public interest to proceed with this Bill as the proposals will assist in reducing the regulatory burden for businesses, industry and citizens by simplifying the complex stock of legislation currently on the Statute Book and this will also help to provide legal clarity. The importance of simplifying this complex stock was noted with approval by the OECD review, Better Regulation in Ireland 2010, which reported that initiatives such as the Statute Law Revision Acts were impressive efforts to address the challenge and improve accessibility.

As I said in my opening remarks, the principal purpose of the Bill is to repeal spent and obsolete secondary instruments enacted on or after 1 January 1821 and before 1 January 1861. This Bill will also repeal those instruments enacted before 1 January 1821 that are still in force and were not repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 2015. The process leading to the Bill involved a review, carried out by the Law Reform Commission and sponsored by my Department, of more than 40,000 secondary instruments to ascertain if they were obsolete or were to be repealed or retained. Of those, more than 3,000 will be repealed by the Bill attached to this memorandum and they are listed in Schedule 2.

I will outline to the House the main provisions of the Bill. Section 1 of the Bill provides definitions for terms used throughout the Bill.

Section 2 of the Bill revokes all instruments passed prior to 1 January 1861 other than those retained instruments specified in the first Schedule. These instruments are suitable for revocation because they have no ongoing relevance in this jurisdiction; and-or are spent, which means they have ceased to be in force, or are obsolete, that is they deal with a subject matter which no longer exists, which has been superseded by subsequent legislation or which is no longer regulated by legislation. The instruments set out in Part 1 of Schedule 1 were formerly set out at reference numbers 2, 3 and 7 of Schedule 1 to the Statute Law Revision Act 2015. This latter Schedule retained 43 instruments. Forty of these instruments were names and arms instruments. The Law Reform Commission conducted further research in recent weeks which revealed that these names and arms instruments did not in fact require retention and these are now being revoked. Two of the instruments being retained in Part 2 of Schedule 1 are notices defining the parts of the River Shannon over which the Shannon Commissioners may exercise their powers under the Shannon Navigation Act 1839. These were made pursuant to section 39 of the Shannon Navigation Act 1839, which remains in force. They remain valid for regulatory purposes as they define the parts of the River Shannon to which the Shannon Navigation Act 1839 applied. The revocation in section 2 of the Bill is a general revocation provision which will revoke all instruments made prior to 1 January 1861, even where those instruments are not expressly included in the Schedules.

Section 3, for ease of reference, refers to the secondary instruments specified in Schedule 2 which are revoked. There are more than 3,000 instruments listed in the Schedule following the review of all available secondary legislation from 1821 to 1860.

Section 4 allows each instrument listed in Part 1 of Schedule 1 to be officially cited using the citation provided in column (4) of this Schedule.

Section 5 provides savings clauses. Sections 5(1) and 5(2) provide that the inclusion of an Act in the Schedule shall not be construed as meaning that the Act, or any provision of it, was of full force and effect immediately before the passing of this Act.

Section 6 supplements existing evidence laws, allowing for prima facie evidence of instruments made before 1 January 1861 to be presented in courts and legal proceedings by producing a published copy from specified sources such as the Dublin Gazette or the London Gazette.

Section 7 provides a Short Title for this Bill when enacted and collective citation for all the Statute Law Revision Acts to date.

Schedule 1 lists the specific instruments that are to be retained. Schedule 2 lists the specific instruments identified in the course of the review as appropriate for repeal at this stage because they have ceased to be relevant or have become unnecessary. In the course of the debate in the Seanad a number of concerns were raised regarding item 1 in Schedule 1, namely, the Genealogical Office Order of 1685. I am happy to inform the House that following engagement by my Department and the Law Reform Commission with the Senator who raised this, Senator Boyhan, as well as the Genealogical Society of Ireland and the director of the National Library, these concerns have been addressed. I will be bringing amendments on Committee Stage to revoke the 1685 order. I thank Senator Boyhan for his work on the Bill as well as those who engaged with me in the Seanad on this. We had a real example of meaningful engagement with both me and officials in my Department as well as the Law Reform Commission regarding the appropriateness of retaining this order on the Statute Book. It is a really good example of practical and respectful engagement between Ministers and Members of the Oireachtas to address concerns and strengthen the legislative process.

This Bill, as Members will have gathered, is rather technical but it is really important and necessary. It represents another step in the journey to clarifying and simplifying the Statute Book. This Bill’s enactment will deliver benefits because it will facilitate the process of public governance reform, reduce the regulatory burden on businesses and citizens, ensure our Statute Book is significantly more modern and enhance public access to the laws that govern our people as they go about their business in their daily lives. I commend the Bill to the House.

Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh

I welcome this Bill. It is the fourth if not the fifth such legislation I have addressed, that is, a Statue Law Revision Bill, where the State eventually gets around to getting rid of old British laws that have sat on our statutes. At this stage there are quite a number that are totally superfluous because they are proclamations to arrest people who have been dead for over 100 if not 200 years. It shows how the Statue Book can get clogged up, especially given the over 850-year history of this island being subject to imperialism.

I welcome what the Minister of State said just now. It saves me the bother of repeating what Senator Boyhan had intended. I thank Michael Merrigan from the genealogical groups who have campaigned for quite a number of years and highlighted this as an issue, which is not just a one-off. As the Minister of State said, it is good the public can have that influence through Senators and TDs. It is part of the work we do.

People sometimes identify anomalies in our laws because of their circumstances or interests and in this case there did not seem to be any logic to retention of the Ulster King of Arms. There is a whole debate around the granting of arms and the like. Again, it is useful given the huge number of proclamations now being rescinded or deleted from our Statue Book by this legislation. In the explanatory memorandum, there is mention of 40,000 secondary instruments that were looked at in this case. Only 3,367 of those are being repealed, so the question is: what is happening to the other 36,633? Have they been updated? Are they now part of or tied to our existing legislation or is it that at some stage or other they will be superseded by new laws? I remember in the past some of it was to do with legal title and rights to land. I am not sure about that in this instance. It is not clear. It was mentioned that five instruments were being retained but that will obviously be reduced to four with the removal of one on foot of the amendment the Minister of State proposes.

In all this, I wish those who attempted to go through 40,000 pieces of legislation well. God love them. I hope they now have a professorship or similar based on this. When we look at the titles, they are in some ways innocuous, but it gives a glimpse of the disturbed nature of Ireland in those years because most of them are proclamations to arrest somebody or other for damage to property or in many cases for the burning of crops or the like. There is a reference to the apprehension of persons for the murder of somebody in Aughnacloy. When most people are taught about this period of history in school they are taught Ireland was quite peaceful, that people were very poor and that they did nothing because they all supported Daniel O’Connell. However, if you go through this Bill, you see they were not supporting Daniel O’Connell and his peaceful means at all. They were more aligned with the Ribbonmen or the Whiteboys. Agrarian outrages was the way the British put this across. Ireland was very poor.

AAn illustration of how poor is that nearly half the British Army was recruited from Ireland at that stage. That was the scale of the poverty. People had no choice as there was no money. While everybody who went to school here, and many around the world, will know of the Famine of 1845 to 1850, they will not be aware of the huge number of crop failures not just in that period but before and after that famine. The only recourse people had in many cases was to attack the stores of food the landlords and their agents held. That was a way to try to get food and distribute it among people. People were also being driven off their land and being sent, even at that early stage in the 19th century, to America. Passage to America was being sought before the Famine. It accelerated because of the Famine and that allowed the clearance of huge landed estates across the country and there was a reaction among the Irish at that time. They sought to defend their land and our nationality. The Ribbonmen were often very local agrarian societies. Often they amalgamated and they became just a small local society. There is a history there and some of that history has fortunately been well-written.

A number of specific items jumped out at me. They highlight periods of revolution or risings at different stages across the country. They are a glimpse of our history, so while we are deleting them from our Statute Book, they still exist as part of our history. They will still exist in the libraries into the future. I noticed reference to an "Order preparing a form of prayer and thanksgiving to Almighty God for Her Majesty’s safe delivery of a prince". That sounds grandiose, but then a year later one can see a "Proclamation for apprehending the five men who murdered Matthew Hill, agent, in the Glen of Aherlow, Co. Tipperary".

That was literally at the time when the first potato crop was been failing in County Tipperary and elsewhere around the country. There are those kinds of events. There are other events reflected in these proclamations. I advise people who have an interest in the history of that period to look at them and they will see the proclamations that were issued which capture, even in the short subject matter we have in front of us, what was happening in those regions at that time. In 1849, for instance, in Cappoquin, there was a rising of the forerunners of the Fenians. There is no name. It was not the Young Irelanders. There is a proclamation for their arrest for the killing of RIC Sub-Constable Owens at Cappoquin. That is where one of the casualties of that rising happened. There were consequences to those proclamations. Sometimes people were apprehended; other times they were not. Sometimes when they were apprehended, especially in that period of our history, they were transported to Australia, and there is a whole history there. There is link not just to here but also abroad. It is a very interesting exercise. When I studied history, this was not an area where I would go looking for history or details. In fact, it points that way. It was the same with the other Statue Law Revision Act in that people do not usually, when they are studying history, go to the law books to find out what laws were passed, but this is a treasure trove.

I welcome the Bill and the decision to address the anomaly that is there. I have asked one question. We can come back to some of this on Committee Stage.

Deputy Mairéad Farrell

This is an unusual Bill to say the least. It is a Bill which we had some fun looking through and something I had not come across before. It proposes to repeal spent and obsolete secondary instruments enacted on or after 1 January 1821 and before 1 January 1861, which is a bit before my time. This Bill will also repeal those instruments enacted before 1 January 1821 that are still enforced and were not repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act 2015. Given the length of time that has passed and considering that these are spent and obsolete instruments, we will support the Bill.

The context in which it arises is that it is the latest in a series of measures that have been enacted to modernise and improve public accessibility to the Statute Book and secondary legislation. The statute law revision programme is the State's programme to identify and remove obsolete and spent primary and secondary legislation from the Statue Book. The aim and purpose of the programme is to repeal legislation that has ceased to be enforced due to changes in circumstances or the passing of time, and legislation that, while technically in force, is no longer of relevance in practice today. Given that we are talking about legislation that predates 1861, it is of a very historic nature. It predates the establishment of this State and partition by 61 years. As such, it is probably worth noting, as we have given time to have this debate, the type of Ireland we had at that time. This legislation predates Gladstone's speech in the House of Commons on Home Rule, which took place in 1871. It predates the Fenian Rising of 1867 by at least six years. For those unfamiliar with that event, the Fenians proclaimed a provisional republican government. They also issued their own proclamation which predated the 1916 Proclamation by 50 years. The last few lines of that proclamation are quite interesting. It states:

Remember the past, look well to the future, and avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human liberty.

Herewith we proclaim the Irish Republic.

The legislation was enacted during events such as the Tithe War, which took place between 1830 and 1836. That campaign was one of mainly non-violent civil disobedience, albeit with different episodes within it. It arose after people were forced to make cash payments to the Church of Ireland in respect of the religious affiliation, and that was obviously in the context of the Penal Laws that came before that.

We are dealing with secondary instruments as part of the Bill but some of these relate to primary legislation and deserve a mention while we are dealing with this or while we are on a trip down memory lane when it comes to this legislation. Catholics were excluded from public office from 1607, with Presbyterians also barred from public office from 1707 onwards. There was a ban on the Irish language being used in court in 1737. There was a ban on intermarriage with Protestants, although that was repealed in 1778, and there are many other Acts of this nature. It is worth recognising the role that was played in the 1798 rebellion of the United Irishmen, who obviously drew their inspiration from the French Revolution of 1789 and its rallying calls based on equality. They also looked cod the abolition of the system known as the landlord's church and they referred to the Church of Ireland, which required those tithes to apply to Catholics and dissenters. There was the failure of that rebellion and so on but then we had the Act of Union in 1800 whereby Britain moved to incorporate Ireland into the United Kingdom. Despite promises, it would take 30 years before Catholic emancipation was delivered, although that can be disputed.

One of the secondary instruments we are repealing as part of this Bill was legislation to stop an event involving Daniel O'Connell event. Following his election to the British Parliament, it is worth noting that the size of the Irish electorate was significantly reduced to mainly propertied class. The Young Irelander, John Mitchel, believed that this was always the intent. He believed it was to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses, the kind who would later find expression in Michael Davitt's Land League. Before the Land League there were the Whiteboys and the Ribbonmen and these rebellious acts against landlordism and for equal treatment would prove an inspiration for many across the world.

This is unusual, though quite interesting, legislation. It is strange to be dealing with something from that era. However, things never cease to surprise me in this Chamber and this is interesting as well. As I said, given the nature of it we will be supporting the Bill.

Deputy Robert O'Donoghue

Deleting obscure, outdated and often bizarre laws is something we are pretty good at in this country. We are world beaters, in fact. Between 2003 and 2016, we got around 60,000 of them off the books and this legislation will remove over 3,000 more laws and proclamations that remain on the Statute Book as a legacy of empire and a reminder of some of the country's darkest days.

The orders and proclamations that are being removed from the Statute Book by this long-overdue legislation date from between 1821 and 1861 and point to decades in Irish life that were cruel, grim, violent and rife with starvation and poverty. More than 2,500 of these proclamations offer rewards for culprits of long-forgotten crimes. Unless those culprits have almost two centuries of living under their belts, it is unlikely that any of them are going to be caught at this point. The crimes range from setting fires to houses, ricks of hay and barns and mills, to beating people with sticks and stones and even nettles. Rather oddly through modern eyes, it seems that breaking eggs was judged as harshly as arson in this period. Perhaps less surprisingly, there are a lot of proclamations related to potatoes, a commodity we know defined this dark period in Irish history. According to an article published in The Irish Times last Saturday, the aforementioned beating with nettles took place in 1834 in Mayo after attackers ordered two men to sell potatoes on credit. The same article details another proclamation seeking to apprehend the culprits who broke open vaults in the churches of St. Andrew and St. Mark in Dublin and opened several coffins, extracting teeth from the bodies within.

Until these laws are deleted, it will still technically be illegal for any of us to attend a particular meeting called by Daniel O'Connell in 1843 which never actually took place.

As you read through the laws being deleted by this Bill, you get a window into the past - a past where food was so precious that breaking eggs amounted to a high crime and where people took a beating with nettles for the sake of a couple of potatoes. There are Famine-era laws which, thankfully, we do not need anymore and, although the Bill seeks to erase these redundant laws from the Statute Book, we should never forget the circumstances that led to their enactment. The history of this era, the trauma that resonates through the generations from that time, the impact on our population and the emigration and death that flowed from the events of these years will not be wiped away by any piece of legislation, nor should it be. While it is time to put these laws from this era to bed, we should work just as hard to preserve the history in order that we can learn from it and never return to those dark days.

The process that has led to this legislation has been exhaustive and anyone who contributed to it should be congratulated. It has been an important process that has reckoned with our past and sought to modernise our Statute Book. It is progressive legislation and my Labour Party colleagues and I welcome it. Previous Acts have repealed all obsolete primary legislation enacted before Independence and revoked obsolete secondary legislation made up to 1 January 1821. This tranche of repeals will take us up to the 1860s, so our work in this regard may not be finished just yet.

The process which brought us to Second Stage of the Bill involved an exhaustive review of entries from this period on the Statute Book carried out by the Law Reform Commission. It went through some 40,000 secondary instruments to find out if they were obsolete and whether they needed to be repealed or retained. Interestingly, the commission found that only a handful of secondary instruments from this period should be kept on the Statute Book and these relate to boundaries on the River Shannon which were judged to still be valid. The commission stated the process has contributed to legislative clarity in numerous areas and has also proven to be a useful exercise for historians, amateur and professional, with an interest in this period of Irish history. This period has long been a focus for historians and encompasses the years of the Tithe War, Catholic emancipation and the Great Famine. It was a time of great upheaval and some of these laws reveal a whiff of desperation from the empire as it tried to keep a lid on the revolutionary rumblings from across the Irish Sea.

The public and other interested parties were invited to participate in this process and it has led us to this point in the framing of the legislation that is to be commended. It is a Bill with wide support. The ultimate aim of the process is to create a clear, concise and accessible modern Statute Book fit for the times we are living in now and the circumstances that will prevail in the country in 2025. In working towards this aim, we have learned a lot about our past, who we were and where we have come from. If we propel ourselves into the future and imagine the Dáil sitting 150 or 200 years from now, one wonders which laws we are enacting today will seem weird or wacky to the sensibilities of the 22nd century or 23rd century TDs. Many of them might wonder why such a rich country failed to house its people or provide them with adequate public services, but those are arguments for another day. At least we are in agreement with the Government on this legislation. The Labour Party is happy to support the Bill.

Deputy Ruairí Ó Murchú

This is an interesting piece of legislation. We are repealing the spent and obsolete secondary instruments enacted on or after 1 January 1821 and before 1 January 1861, as well as those instruments enacted before 1821 that have not been previously repealed.

I suspect that many Deputies did not anticipate they would be speaking on this issue but, in fairness, it is not only a decent piece of housekeeping that needs to be done from a legislative point of view, but also a reminder of where we came from and the particular circumstances that arose. We are talking about legislation that was foisted upon Ireland by the British colonial power from 1821, which was literally 20 years after the Act of Union. The Act of Union was about Britain further imposing the power it had in Ireland following 1798 and the attempts by the Irish people to rid themselves of foreign occupation and oppression. This is about the whole history of colonialism and its parts, including subjugation and, obviously, rebellion. Deputy Ó Snodaigh and others have spoken about Daniel O'Connell. There was a whole constitutional battle relating to Catholic emancipation and the effort to remove the penal laws which then morphed into the Home Rule movement. I see that as an abject failure because, at the end of the day, the colonial power, Britain, paid no heed to providing anything to Ireland that was not going to be taken. Unfortunately, for a significant part of our history, that involved being taken by force. We had the Young Irelanders, the Fenians and those who followed in their footsteps. Whatever freedom this island knows is on the basis of what happened.

This was also the period, in 1847 or from 1845 to 1850, of the Famine. We often talk about the wonderful Irish diaspora but it is always worth remembering how that diaspora happened. It came about because, in a land that could have looked after its people, they were not looked after. This was not only because it was under occupation, but also as a result of the neo-liberal politics in operation in Britain and the idea that market forces were far more important and things were allowed to operate as they were. Food had to be sold as a good and it did not really matter that 1 million people in this land died as a result.

We can be very thankful we do not live in those very difficult times and we are only too delighted we live in the modern age. While we are dealing with legacy legislation, however, we should also look at dealing with the legacy issues that remain. This island is partitioned and we should be looking in this House and beyond at making sure the preparatory moves are made by the State to do our part in respect of what a united Ireland might look like. It is up to Government to come up with some idea for a forum where this conversation could happen and then we would need to look at a referendum.

Even before that, we have huge issues which need to be dealt with as regards taxation laws across this island that do not work properly. The Minister of State would be aware of this in the context of PayPal. It became apparent with remote working and the issues caused there. We need to deal with these issues. The previous Taoiseach spoke about a possible hub to deal with cross-Border issues and that needs to be looked at again.

Deputy Sinéad Gibney

I wish to first call out the key role the Law Reform Commission has played in bringing this Bill before us. Its work is not normally or necessarily headline-grabbing but represents a vital and painstaking role in keeping our law under review and researching law with a view to reform.

Our Statute Book should be reflective of the laws that govern us and free of historical instruments that simply no longer apply. Making that happen is expert, arduous and technical work and a true act of public service. Táim fíor-bhuíoch as an obair sin.

This Bill shines a light on how much has changed in a relatively short space of time. We see mentions of people being sentenced to transportation, prohibition of vice and in 1846, prayers against famine. It also gives a snapshot of a nation which was increasingly struggling for its independence. Meetings organised by Daniel O'Connell on home rule were being prohibited. Most of the people affected by these warrants and orders would not see self government in their own lifetime.

It is important to consign colonial laws to history. It is also important that we do not forget them. Is fúinn atá sé foghlaim ón stair. These statutes have so much to teach us. They paint a picture of our past which at times can seem so abstract. In this Bill there are proclamations requiring slaves in the East Indies to submit to the law, ports being declared proper for importing goods from the East India Company; proclamations prohibiting vice and immorality and encouraging piety and virtue. These are reminders that without the checks and balances of recognising our common humanity and the rights of all, we can see laws that bring about grave injustices, that the trade, goods and money that flows across this world can seem so innocuous reaching our shores but is dyed in the blood of those far from our borders; that the control, particularly of women and LGBT people, as immoral and sinful is still something we tackle today in the oppression that they face. On the other hand, the 1856 proclamation of thanksgiving that peace in Europe was restored at the end of the Crimean war, is a reminder that we must strive for peace, that it is the ordinary people who are caught up in the crossfire of warring countries and that we have seen the scourge of war in Europe across the centuries. What we do with that is the test of every generation. Tá súil agam go mbeimid in ann bóthar níos fearr a roghnú agus go bhfuilimid dáiríre faoi na ceachtanna seo a fhoghlaim.

While the removal of outdated laws from our Statute Book is welcome there is still much work to do to provide us with a modern, updated Statute Book. We face many choices of what we do and who we become as a nation even now. I hope we choose well and with this Bill coming before the House that we are serious about learning the lessons of the past.

Deputy Malcolm Byrne

I welcome this legislation. It is quite useful that we look at old laws and where necessary that we repeal them. I commend the Law Reform Commission and indeed the officials in the Department who worked on this.

One of the proclamations being repealed is an 1831 proclamation around the stealing of sheep belonging to the Sinnott family of Parkannesley, Ballygarret, County Wexford. The Sinnott family continues to farm in that area. They are quite happy to allow an amnesty if information comes forward in these circumstances. However, it shows the importance of our history within this area. One of the things that will be useful is if some of the documents related to this were made available to local history societies and organisations because there is a rich social history in some of the work involved. I have assured some of the extended members of the Sinnott family that if any information does come forward with regard to who killed the sheep during the 1830s that that information will be provided to the family.

An Cathaoirleach Gníomhach

Is there a reward?

Deputy Malcolm Byrne

There was a reward apparently. The issue I want to raise is related to that, around the repeal of legislation. While much of the legislation here is outdated and traditional, one of the biggest pieces of legislation that dates from that period, from the 1830s, was the commercial rates legislation, on which local government funding was established in Ireland. It was established under the principles that were set out by George IV that led in turn to Griffith's Valuation and so on. We continue to use those outdated mechanisms for the funding of local government. We are using a 200-year-old system of determining how we fund local government. In today's modern enterprise economy, as the Minister of State knows only too well and particularly in her previous brief as Minister of State with special responsibility for retail, a business can be far more successful on a mobile phone and can have a far higher turnover than one that has a very large floor space. For us to continue to base essentially a quarter of the funding of local governments on legislation that is 200 years old is not acceptable. I appreciate it is not directly relevant to some of the key points of this legislation. However, as we are repealing proclamations and legislation from that era, I encourage the Minister of State to look at this. I was disappointed within the programme for Government that there was not a commitment to review the system of commercial rates. I support commercial rates. We need to have properly funded local government. However, to base local government funding on a system that is essentially 200 years old, where the size of the premises determines how much is paid, was fine in the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s but is not fine to do so now in the same way. Certainly a lot of this outdated legislation needs to be repealed.

Deputy Cathal Crowe

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this. Fianna Fáil welcomes and supports the Statute Law Revision Bill 2024 which will simplify and improve accessibility to legislation. There is a whole raft of legislation that I would say is unknown to us. It is buried in the depths of archives covered in dust and cobwebs. It is right to start revising some of this, pulling it forward and making it more modernised.

Can I speak in the spirit of the latitude that is sometimes allowed in this Chamber, if the Cathaoirleach Gníomhach will allow me? We are talking about lots of secondary legislation for the 1820 to 1860 period. I raised this point before with the Taoiseach in the previous Dáil. It is time that we posthumously pardoned people who were convicted in this country for crimes of hunger. There is one for the Minister of State. In my locality there is a beautiful hill called Gallows Hill. The Minister of State can imagine what happened there. It is in Cratloe. The townland is Gallows Hill and the actual hill where people were hanged in the 1800s is known locally as the Carrick. About 200 yards from that is another hill called Cruac-a-Bairile, Barrell Hill, where people were rolled down in a barrel during penal times for theft of sheep, cabbage and basic food items to help a family to survive. These were all crimes committed under these so-called secondary laws from the 1820 to 1860 period. Of course this was the time of British rule. I am not saying that the current State that we enjoy here, the independent Irish State, is responsible for that. Certainly however, as the custodians of this country we have a moral obligation to do something for these people. This has happened in other jurisdictions. I believe posthumous pardons have been given in Australia. It is high time that this happened in Ireland.

If the Minister of State is ever in County Clare I would be delighted to show her Gallows Hill, or the Carrick as we call it locally. It is quite close to my own farm. There are still footholds on top of that hill where the gallows stood 150 or 170 years ago or thereabouts. Dozens of people were killed there for crimes committed just to help their families to survive. This was a hotbed for death and emigration during the Famine period. Dozens of people from my community who did not make it to the soup kitchen or the workhouse perished on that hill for trying to keep their families alive. It would be fabulous if some day the Taoiseach could reference the laws that these people were supposed to have broken and that they would be pardoned for all of that.

In the spirit of this, I will mention my great-great-grandfather. His picture hangs in my office over in LH2000 - he being John Hargrove who lived in that townland of Gallows Hill. He was a Land League leader. Like many people, he spent time in prison - prisons in Galway, Clonmel and Limerick - during that period, standing up for the impoverished and those who were struggling. In the spirit of this, people who were imprisoned during that period for standing up for tenant farmers, for those who were impoverished and for those who were starving should be posthumously pardoned. It is not nice that they have prison records. Someone should go to prison for crimes that are befitting of a custodial sentence, certainly not for crimes to keep their young offspring alive.

That is all I have to say. I have thrown a bit of a curve ball at the Minister of State, Deputy Higgins, but she is busily taking notes. There is smoke rising from the Minister of State's pen which tells me she will carry this note forward to her colleagues in Cabinet. I would ask that some day, here in this Chamber, the Taoiseach or Tánaiste or, ideally, both of them might devote time to making some statements on this. These laws are at the bottom of the staircase leading to the Dáil Chamber. They are old books, as I said, covered in dust. They are leather bound. They are the laws that shackled our people for hundreds of year and by which many of our forefathers were judged to have been criminals when their only crime was keeping their loved ones alive.

Deputy Conor D. McGuinness

I welcome this long-overdue legislation and I commend the team involved in it. It involved a huge amount of work, no doubt interesting but painstaking. It also involved a huge amount of detail. We are grateful for that work having been completed and being presented to us here today.

Having a look through this, I see so many proclamations that refer to activities in my own county of Waterford in the 1840s and 1850s. It struck me that these proclamations - the laws - were, indeed, some of the legal means used to bind our people, to dispossess them, to colonise our land, to colonise our space and to colonise our means of production and to impoverish our people.

What we see here, and particularly in the proclamations, is attempts to criminalise those who were fighting back. I agree with previous speakers who say that, perhaps as part of this process or perhaps at the culmination and the enactment of this legislation, there should be a reckoning by this State. Perhaps it is not the responsibility of this State but, certainly, the opportunity should be taken for the State to say that those crimes that were committed - crimes according to these proclamations but really acts of resistance and acts of survival for our people - should be dispensed with. As these proclamations are repealed, we should repeal the mentality that allowed it to happen.

For any observer looking at Irish society and the revulsion within Irish society at attempts internationally to ride roughshod over human rights norms, at settler colonialism which is at its heart about taking land, heritage and a homeland from people, at the crime of starvation and using starvation as a weapon of war and at the mass incarceration, transportation and clearing of people that is going on - we see it happening in Gaza, the West Bank and in other parts of the world - and who really wants to know why the people of Ireland see that, call it out and will not tolerate it, this is why. It is because this is our history - the history of starvation as a tool to oppress our people and the history of land clearances, of agrarian unrest and of resistance.

Deputy Catherine Connolly

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill and I thank the Minister of State for her speech. I especially thank the Library and Research Service that serves us well and that produced the abstract for us and educated us. The Bill itself is short. The Schedules attached to it are somewhat longer. The context of this Bill is important and previous speakers referred to it. We are talking about a period between January 1821 and January 1861. I was going to say this Bill is going to get rid of spent or obsolete secondary instruments. The correct word escapes me. It will abandon or get rid of them.

Deputy Emer Higgins

Revoke.

Deputy Catherine Connolly

That period of time from 1821 to 1861 has already been referred to. It hits all of us. We are talking about Daniel O'Connell and emancipation during this period of time right up to the Famine. It is hard to look at this and realise that we are still dealing with famine in the 21st century.

I will come back to the body of this quickly. I will not speak for long on it but there is a feeling of awful frustration that we learn so little. While this is a technical Bill, with statutes and regulations that we do not need anymore and that are obsolete, and it is a welcome piece of work, it brings up so many memories from a particular time and yet we are doing the exact same thing all over again. We are doing it in Palestine and the Sudan. We are allowing it to happen everywhere. I will not use my voice on that but I could not but say it.

It is important when we have law that it is clear and we should know where we stand with the law, both the ordinary person and business people, as rights-based reason and to save money. This type of reform has been going on since 2005. I thank the Law Reform Commission and the sub-committee that has worked on this for their good work on what is redundant legislation.

We are told there will be four main policy-related outcomes as a result of this. The first relates to the rule of law. In a state that follows the rule of law principle, citizens and businesses should know the law that regulates them and whether that law is in force. I will come back to that in a minute in relation to other modern legislation that has never been commenced. However, we should know whether the law is in force and the work of the Law Reform Commission will identify definitively what pre-1922 secondary legislation still applies.

The second is reduced compliance costs. The work will reduce compliance costs for businesses, public servants and regulatory bodies who must spend time and more money finding the up-to-date picture of legislation. From a previous life, I am fully aware of how difficult that is and how costly it becomes.

Rights and obligations imposed by law should be easy to find. It is very basic. I refer to consolidation of legislation and the digital first policy. I repeat rights and obligations imposed by law should be easy to find. We are going through this process to ensure that and that is welcome. We are living in the 21st century where international law is being reduced to terrible terms such as "rules-based order". We do not know whose rules or what rules. It is the rules of whoever is in power at the time as opposed to international law based on rights - rights that should be easy to find and to implement. None of that is happening, of course, in relation to international law and what Israel blatantly is getting away with.

We had the OECD report on this in 2010. It pointed out that Ireland has a long-standing issue of needing to simplify a complex stock of legislation. All this has been said and I merely wanted to highlight that and the clarity of the work from the Library and Research Service.

My colleague, Thomas Pringle, who unfortunately is not a Member of this Dáil, did a huge amount of work in the previous Dáil asking questions on what legislation had not been implemented or what number of reviews had not been carried out. I will not be here but I will listen to the Minister of State's answer. Could we get some clarification? Is there a body of work being done by the Law Reform Commission or any other body on legislation that has never been implemented or has been implemented only in part? That is merely a sample of the answers Thomas Pringle, when he was a Deputy, went to the trouble to seek. Every Department had to answer. The former Deputy limited his question to ten years and the answers that came back showed an absence of data on that and an absence of a forum to look at that.

We should know within a reasonable time what legislation has not been commenced and why it has not been commenced. Later tonight we will look at Údarás na Gaeltachta and Acht na dTeangacha Oifigiúla will come up in the debate. It is only a few years since the Act was passed and some of the sections are still to be implemented. How many pieces of legislation that have been on our books for 10 or 20 years have not been fully commenced, let alone implemented? Then there are the reviews that should be taking place, sometimes as a matter of course and other times as it is written into the legislation, such as in the case of the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act that we passed back in 2017. Built into that was an obligation to review that law to see if it was effective. I note that the Minister for Justice announced this week that it was to be published yesterday or the day before that, five years after the obligation should have been complied with. If I know that just from my interest in that legislation, how many other pieces of legislation are in the same position? If the Minister of State would clarify that, I would appreciate it.

Deputy Robert O'Donoghue

Independent Ireland will support this Bill and the idea of simplifying the law to make it more accessible to the general public. The aim is to reduce compliance costs for businesses and bodies which interact with our legislation regularly. It is the stated policy of our party to achieve this across the public sector and beyond.

I wish to record our admiration for the sterling work of the Law Reform Commission on the statutory law revision programme in bringing forward this seventh Bill on the area. With 3,367 instruments to be revoked, I can imagine the detailed scrutiny involved. These are laws from 1821 to 1861 and we are only now bringing them up to date. I hope we can bring a lot of our laws up to date such that people can be protected and to avoid cases dragging on for years and decades going through court, especially when they involve people who do harm to others. There are people who are known for their criminal activity. We need to give the powers to the people to police this country and make it safer.

Independent Ireland will support the Bill and, again, I acknowledge the work done by the Law Reform Commission on this.

Deputy Barry Ward

I welcome this Bill. The statute law revision project is hugely valuable which has been going on for more than 20 years. When I worked as legal adviser to Enda Kenny TD, as he was then, when he was leader of Fine Gael in opposition, the first of these Bills, the Statute Law Revision (Pre-1922) Bill 2004, which became the Act of 2005, was being dealt with and I had more time to peruse the 18th century and older legislation that were being deleted or expunged by that legislation. It is a hugely important project. To say it is an arduous task which those involved face is an understatement. I understand that for this Bill 40,000 secondary instruments were reviewed to ascertain whether they were obsolete and to be replaced and, of those, 3,367 will be repealed in the Bill. It is an enormous volume of material to go through but it is obviously a very valuable and important process.

A perusal of the Bill reveals some of the very interesting proclamations that are being dealt with. One is the proclamation for apprehending the persons who posted an illegal notice at Tubber, near Dunlavin, County Wicklow, warning Thomas Holland to give up certain lands on 4 April 1834. I do not know whether Thomas did that or not but it is interesting that we should do away with that legislative instrument at this stage. There was another proclamation for apprehending the 16 men who walked into the Royal Canal Company’s store yard at the Royal Canal Harbour in the parish of St. Michael’s, County Dublin, and broke several barrels belonging to Mr. Guinness, brewer, in 1837. There is a proclamation for apprehending the persons who set fire to a large stack of flax belonging to James Caldwell of Tamnavetton, parish of Kilmore, County Armagh in 1837, and an order setting the close time for salmon in the Skibbereen District in 1856. There is a proclamation made in 1825 appointing 6 January 1826 as the day from which the silver and gold coins of Great Britain may pass current and circulate in Ireland in 1825 and an order requiring all out-pensioners and registered men of Chelsea Hospital and Kilmainham Hospital to present for a fitness examination in December 1821. There is such a wide variety of material covered by this, it is extraordinary.

This is the culmination of a project that has gone through iterations in the 2007 Act and those of 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2016. An enormous amount of work had to be done. Another item that drew my attention was reference No. 138 in the appendix, which is the order convening a meeting for carrying the Lighting of Towns (Ireland) Act 1828 into force in the town of Kingstown. Another that caught my attention is No. 1209 in the appendix, relating to Monkstown and dating from 9 August 1836. It is the proclamation for apprehending the persons who broke into the watch house and vault in the churchyard of the Union of Monkstown in the district of Dublin Metropolis, and forced the lid off a coffin and left the body exposed in an offensive manner. One may cast back to what Monkstown was like in 1836. It is absolutely extraordinary. Most of what we now know as Monkstown in Dublin was not even built at that time. The railway, which was not built until 1837, absolutely transformed that area of Dublin as the first commuter railway in the world, the Dublin to Kingstown railway as it was known, from what is now Pearse Station out to Dún Laoghaire. It changed the whole topography of that area because it was built across the sands at Sandymount and Blackrock and created a lagoon inside the track and created an entirely different coastline. Now in Blackrock you can see sea cliffs in the park that, prior to 1837, were where the waves would have crashed up from Dublin Bay. At that time, Monkstown was very much a rural area occupied by people in isolated houses, many of them large houses that were owned by merchants who worked in Dublin and had them as their country residences. Those were lands that were given to the monks of St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin, from which we get Abbey Street and St. Mary’s Abbey in Dublin. They were granted those lands and they occupied an enormous area that went as far as Bullock Harbour near Dalkey, where they built, for example, Bullock Harbour. Imagine how different that landscape would have been at the time this proclamation was made in 1836 compared with what we know today in the suburban area that is Monkstown. Many of the buildings that were there remain. Slightly later was the Church of Ireland church that was built at the junction in the centre of Monkstown village. It is a building that many will know. It is a particularly beautiful building and one which people may visit. It is worth mentioning that the schoolhouse attached to it was recently lovingly and extensively refurbished by the parish there. Canon Roy Byrne, the rector, deserves enormous credit for the work that was done there to restore it to what it had been. It was opened recently. It deserves note that the landscape has changed so significantly.

This is an enormous body of work that had to be done. In 100 years' time, a similar Bill may have to be brought before these Houses to carry out a similar cleaning exercise on obsolete legislation. I do not know if that will be necessary but I repeatedly make a twofold point in these Houses when legislation is going through, particularly amending legislation. First, it is largely illegible for anyone who does not have the corpus of legislation which precedes it. If a Bill amends three or four other pieces of legislation and a section refers to amending, say, section 9 of the principal Act and then you are told the principal Act in subsection 2 is amended in paragraph (a) by replacing “and” with “or”, nobody knows what that means without also getting the principal Act that is being amended, and that Act itself may have also been amended elsewhere. This is a project that requires an awful lot of man hours.

Reference has been made to those working on this project within the Office of the Attorney General and particularly in the Law Reform Commission, which does fantastic work. Credit is due to the Law Reform Commission. As a State agency, it delivers time and time again on what it says it will do. It delivers reports that bring common-sense solutions to these Houses and are all too often ignored. They have to do that work because it has not been done on an ongoing basis. In respect of amending legislation, it would make much more sense to take the principal Act that is being amended, repeal it and restate it in the amending Act, so that it is restated with all of the changes that have been made. It may be an awkward job on an ongoing basis for those who are writing the legislation but it would negate the necessity for projects like this to be done 50 or 100 years from now. We would be creating consolidated legislation, essentially, when we sought to amend an older piece of legislation. Sometimes the legislation is not that old.

In the area of road traffic legislation, for example, the laws have been amended dozens of times, literally. The Road Traffic (Amendment) Act 2010 is very difficult to read without putting together a series of other Acts that were passed over the preceding 40 years, primarily since the principal Act of 1961. There are any number of examples of this. Taxes consolidation was done in the 1990s and served us very well at that stage. It was an enormous project to consolidate all the taxation legislation into one Act in 1997, which has since been amended time and time again. When we come to the budget later this year, and we are passing the Finance Act, the Appropriations Act, the Social Welfare Act and all those other pieces of legislation, it would be much more sensible to take the Act that is being amended or even the Acts that are being amended and, instead of leaving them there and changing them with a later document that amends them, bring them all together, repeal the old ones and pass a new piece of legislation which clearly states what it actually intends to do. That would save future generations from sitting down for a great many hours and going through tens of thousands of documents to see whether they are obsolete. It would also make that legislation much more legible to ordinary citizens. If a person wanted to know what the law actually says, they could take down the Act and it would be very clear from reading it, insofar as any Act is clear. It would be easy to read that Act to see what it actually says. We do not do that and I have never been given a convincing reason as to why we do not. It would be in service of the populace of Ireland to make those laws more accessible to them and more easily read.

We could spend all day picking out interesting items that are being expunged through this legislation. Great credit is due to those who have done this work, who have spent the time not just identifying items that should be undone or repealed but also checking there is not a consequence further down the line, subsequent legislation that relies on them or whatever the case may be. It gives an enormous advantage to us as lawmakers but also to those working with law, whether in the courts or other areas of the law, to be able to say with some certainty whether an instrument has been repealed or not. It is the legacy of the statute law revision group that we will have that. This Bill is just the latest iteration of that. Congratulations to them. I thank them for their work and look forward to the passage of the legislation into law.

Deputy Mattie McGrath

I too want to thank everybody involved in this, from the Office of the Attorney General and indeed the Law Reform Commission. I can only imagine the vast volumes of work and time, the painstaking work that had to be undertaken here to bring forward these badly needed changes. It spans from 1821 right up to 1861, including the Famine. I think of our forefathers, O'Connell, Michael Davitt, the Land League and everybody else from those times. I listened to the previous speakers and most of them recounted.

I defer to Deputies Barry Ward and Catherine Connolly, barristers who understand the law and the whole issue of updating it much better than I would as a layperson. They work in that area. How confusing it is for us and also for ordinary citizens to try to grapple with this. We are often slagged off as politicians where there are court cases, strange cases where the law is going back maybe hundreds of years or even much farther than that. The law should be clearly written in order that it can be understood by ordinary citizens. If they are expected to abide by the laws and obey them, the laws should be clearly understood.

We think of the different cases all over the country of people being summonsed, dragged, evicted, sent to execution or sent to Van Diemen's Land. We have a diaspora all over the world because they were forced to leave, mainly. At the time of the Famine, we had ample food in this country but the colonial power decided that it should be used elsewhere, not to feed our people. In my own parish, the ridges that were set up in Dún na Gaoithe are still there. They are clear to see on the side of the mountain. You can see from a distance the ridges that were set up to grow potatoes during the Famine, but they failed. The people who lived there were the O'Neill family and all the different families that we tend to forget. In many places now we see remnants of the Famine times. There are the big soup pots at Clogheen hospital in my own area, which was a workhouse and soup kitchen. There is one on the other side of my parish as well, Ballymacarbry soup kitchens. People were called "soupers" and different derogatory terms. It is so important that we understand our history as well.

I thank the staff, men and women I am sure, in the Departments and in the Law Reform Commission for this painstaking piece of work. As Deputy Barry Ward said, they will probably have to do more again in another 100 years when we are long gone. Maybe we should be able to speed up the process of coming up to date with these pieces of legislation so that any part of what is on the Statute Book would be understood before we can abide by it.

Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform (Deputy Emer Higgins)

Before I begin my closing remarks, I would like to thank the Members who participated in this debate. It has been a really informed and thoughtful discussion. Deputy Seán Crowe mentioned that I was taking copious notes. I will paraphrase some comments. Deputy Farrell said that this body of work has afforded us all a trip down memory lane, and it really has. Deputy Ó Murchú said this was an important piece of legislative housekeeping, which I thought was quite good terminology. Deputy Ó Snodaigh's passion for history really shines when he talks about particular incidents that have been captured in legislation. Often that goes as far back as Famine times, as Deputy Mattie McGrath has said. He also spoke about the impact these laws had at the time and on our own Irish history but also the impact they had on other countries in terms of the spread of our diaspora. He mentioned Australia in particular. Only last week I was in Australia as part of the Government's St. Patrick's Day programme and had the opportunity to meet many descendents of people from that time, Irish people over there. The Deputy is right that many of these laws were the catalyst that led to this situation.

Deputy Ó Snodaigh had a question about the laws that were not going to be revoked. Section 1 provides that the instruments are all going to be revoked, unless they are actually named as what will be retained. Some 37,000 were already identified as obsolete as part of this body of work. The vast majority of these are all being revoked.

Deputy Robert O'Donoghue said that we are considered world leaders when it comes to updating our statute books. I think that is really valid. It is probably because we needed to be, as Ireland has a unique legislative past that has left us with laws from the passage of parliaments in Ireland, England, Great Britain and the UK as well as our Oireachtas. Deputy Gibney correctly called out the important role our Law Reform Commission plays in carrying out public service. Many of our colleagues today have acknowledged the incredible, painstaking work it has done. Deputy Connolly also commended the Library and Research Service publication that has provided us with a summary of that detailed work.

Deputy Malcolm Byrne had two very interesting thoughts.

One related to the Sinnott family and the amnesty he spoke about. The Sinnott family and his constituents might benefit from knowing that scans of each order in full are now available on the Law Reform Commission website. It is to be hoped that is a trip down their own memory lane.

Regarding his comments on commercial rates, and the fact that they are legally established on 200-year-old laws, I fully appreciate where he is coming from. Given my former role as a Minister of State in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, I understand we have a changing landscape when it comes to how business is being done. Perhaps that needs to be examined. That would be a matter for the Minister for local government.

Deputy Cathal Crowe suggested posthumous pardons for people who were killed by laws that are now obsolete. Deputy McGuinness referred to such cases as attempts to criminalise acts of survival. In many cases, that is what they were. To be totally frank, I do not know whether that is possible or how big a job it would be if it was possible. It is certainly something I will consider and I will work with my colleagues in the Department and Law Reform Commission on that.

Deputy Connolly had a specific question on the commencement of legislation and on statutory reviews. That is beyond the scope of the Bill. She made reference to an OECD report. I would like to put on the record that the report referred to the SLRC Acts in Ireland as impressive. We cannot get much higher praise from it than that.

Deputy O'Donoghue spoke about the fact that the Bill will reduce the burden on businesses, and I fully agree with him on that. It will have a positive impact. It was interesting to hear from Deputy Ward that 20 years ago he worked on this project under a different guise. I commend him on his work and his interest in this project over the past 20 years. He shows an interest in modernising our statute laws, which is to be commended. I take on board his suggestion regarding the ongoing consolidation of Acts, rather than repealing an Act and introducing it in a more modern form, and having an Act and then an amendment to an Act. He may already be aware that the Law Reform Commission has revised Acts available on its website, of which there are 500 so far. A lot of progress is happening.

The Bill we have considered today proposes the revocation of all statutory and prerogative instruments made before 1 January 1861, except for the instruments which will be retained in Schedule 1. As we have all acknowledged, over 40,000 secondary instruments have been reviewed by the Law Reform Commission to ascertain whether they were obsolete or to be repealed or retained. The Bill is the seventh statute law revision Bill in a programme, the aim of which is to ensure that Ireland has a modern and accessible Statute Book.

Tidying up all of the spent and obsolete secondary instruments made between 1 January 1821 and 1 January 1861 will contribute significantly towards improving the overall regulatory environment in Ireland. It will simplify and modernise our laws and make the statute book more intelligible. That will save time and money for those who need to know what laws are enforced and it will make it easier for the public to access justice.

Before I conclude, I thank everybody who spent long days and evenings sifting through Ireland's history in our statute book. I thank all Members for their involvement in this debate, in particular Senator Victor Boyhan who worked so collaboratively with us in order to make the change I will introduce. I look forward to further engagement on Committee Stage.

Question put and agreed to.