I move:
That the period for reporting back to the Joint Committee on Marriage Breakdown be extended to the 1st December, 1984.
Senators will recall that we have two types of committees under the new system. There are committees which are considered to have sufficient work that they certainly will last until the end of the period of this Oireachtas and perhaps beyond it. There are also committees appointed to deal ad hoc with particular problems. Whereas the Legislation Committee that we have been dealing with under Motion Nos. 1 and 2, belongs to the former, the Joint Committee on Marriage Breakdown belongs to the latter type of committee.
It was appointed in July 1983. It held its first meeting in September 1983 but it did not have available to it permanent staff until November 1983. Anyone with experience of these committees will realise that while a good deal of preliminary work can be done without permanent staff, a committee only really gets a life of its own and only really settles down to make real progress in regard to its work when in fact it gets permanent staff.
I would like to say that I think it was unfortunate in regard to all the committees that this particular transitional problem of having staff established did in fact take so long. In the case of this committee there were six months between the time of its appointment and the time in which staff was available. That was a transitional problem. We hope that it will not happen again. Many of the committees now have a full time clerk as well as occasional expert staff. In the case of committees that carry on we would hope that the staff will carry on from one Oireachtas to another. In the case of the ad hoc committees we hope that these people would be available once one ad hoc committee has finished in order to work or be replaced by somebody else in the ad hoc committee that would then be set up.
There are other problems of this type. Senator Robinson mentioned them in particular when we were establishing these committees a year ago. I would like to refer to one of them now. That is the question of working out how we avoid delay in the establishment of committees when a new Oireachtas is elected. This is a point to which we could all turn our minds and ensure that we do not have the difficulties which she mentioned about elections rapidly succeeding themselves. We had the position where a committee, as important as the Committee on Legislation under the EEC was not meeting. In regard to this case, the request has now been made by the Joint Committee on Marriage Breakdown, which were asked to report within 12 months — which would mean that they should report next month — for an extension from 12 months to 18 months.
They have been working quite hard since November and we have a number of members of that committee present in the Chamber and I am sure they will assure us of that fact. My understanding is that the committee have already considered the problem of the age of marriage, the question of formalities for marriage and the law of nullity. At the moment, they are examining the question of judicial separation and they feel that, in order to complete their work, they should consider such questions as the structure of family law courts, the question of maintenance, the questions of trustee and guardianship, the question of family property and the question of foreign judgments. I think in view of the difficulties of start up in regard to this particular committee as in others that their request for an extension is reasonable. I think that any request for an extension beyond the extension now being made would not be reasonable, and I would hope that the committee would not be encouraged to think that if the House agrees to this particular extension they could come back and look for another one. My attitude might be quite different on that second occasion. I recommend that the period for reporting back be extended to 1 December 1984.