Departmental Offices
Dail Éireann — 2021-07-13
============================================================

Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

It is appropriate that we have a question on the parliamentary liaison unit of the Government because the behaviour of the Government towards the Parliament in the past week has been striking. The Government has taken a bullying approach, using its majority to bulldoze things through without proper discussion. There have been two examples in the past week. Last Thursday, there was a motion to ram through the increase in the property tax without pre-legislative scrutiny and without the agreement of the relevant committee even. This week, far more seriously, unprecedented and discriminatory legislation that poses a threat to public health is being brought in and the Government plans, against the wishes of every Opposition group on the Business Committee, to get it through in one day. How is that a democratic approach to these important issues? I am against the substance of what is in it but does the Taoiseach not at least accept that we should have had a debate about this over a proper period? The way the Government is doing it risks the making of serious mistakes.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2021-07-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:31+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-07-13