I move amendment No. 5: In page 11, line 19, to delete “erroneously”.

I do not follow this at all. Amendment No. 5a was to make sure that the Court of Appeal can "allow, quash or vary the order under appeal." It is not predetermined by any previous decision. It is to allow the Court of Appeal to vary an order. This is hugely important. At the moment there is a binary provision in the Act that it either allows the appeal or quashes the order under appeal. It may well be the case that the Court of Appeal will find itself in a situation where it determines that a confession or evidence …

I am supportive of what Senator Ward is attempting to achieve. I do not know whether the particular mechanism by which he is proposing it should be done is the correct one. It may be of interest to him to know that when I was Minister for Justice, the exact same point occurred to me. Rather than seeking to cut across the Judges' rules, I asked the Chief Justice at the time to look at the question as to whether this was one which the Judiciary wanted to look at again or whether it thought it was proper for me to att…

I support Senator Ward's amendment. This unnecessary provision to start giving juries prosecution or defence counsel speeches undermines their oath, which is to consider the evidence rather than the arguments that are put before them and to confine themselves to their judgment of the evidence. The other thing I am slightly worried about, and which I raised on the last occasion on which this Bill was before the House, is that jury trials are becoming immensely lengthy. The implication here is that transcripts of spe…

I welcome the amendment to the Order of Business to provide for a debate on the Palestine situation. I will not say anything more about it now. In raising the following issue, I am not engaging in being wise after the event. The hacking of the HSE computer system is very serious. The suggestion that other State computer systems are equally vulnerable is frightening, to say the least. One only has to think of the possibility of the social welfare systems and those of the Department of Finance and various other place…

I welcome the Minister. I agree with everything he said and I agree with everything Senator Joe O'Reilly said. I was listening this morning to our colleague, Senator Black, and she recited a poem that was written by a young woman in Gaza. As I listened to it, and when she got to the point of being given 56 seconds or whatever it was to get out of your home and leave everything behind, I was reminded of my wife's grandfather, Joe Brennan, a founding Senator of the reconstituted Seanad in 1937. He was given a similar…

I welcome the motion. I agree with everything that Senators Blaney and McGreehan have said to date. Mention was made of the Decade of Centenaries in which we are engaged now. In 1923, the Irish Free State Government passed a Bill of indemnity stating that its own forces were completely exonerated from civil or criminal actions in respect of anything that had happened during our Civil War. A year later, a Farmers' Party Deputy put it up to the members of the Government that they should extend that principle to the p…

I agree with what the Leader of the House has just said about the importance of addressing these matters urgently. The damage that has been done to the aviation and tourism industries is very substantial. The damage that has been done in other sectors is very substantial as well. It is true that we were rushed by some people into hotel quarantining on a kind of wave of public anxiety earlier this year. This system was defective from the moment it was enacted but it had to be done to assuage public opinion at the ti…

By the way, I did not object to that Bill but I could see there were major problems with it, including no means of enforcement at all, and ridiculous scenes in the courts since then have confirmed everything I suspected of it. The reason Ireland has been most vulnerable is because our health system is most vulnerable. The reason it is most vulnerable is that we have, uniquely in Europe, the lowest level in any developed country of intensive care facilities to deal with a pandemic of this kind. That situation has ex…

Sorry, that is the kind of infantile-----

I was not in government in 2009 when the first report came in.

Senator Buttimer is out of order but this kind of antagonistic stuff-----

I am not being antagonistic to anybody.

I am not. I am saying that we-----

I am simply saying, and the Senator has to take this on board, that our vulnerability lies in the fact our health establishment saw a problem and did nothing about it for ten years. That is the reality. It had reports saying there was a problem and it did nothing about it. It did other things. It built children's hospitals, or started to build children's hospitals. It did other things but it did not address that issue. What I am saying is that we now face a situation where there could be a recrudescence of this and…

I was badly interrupted, so the Chair might give me another 20 seconds. It is important that we do not spend our time making futile statements to each other and that we deal with legislation, which is badly needed. Where is the Land Development Agency Bill? Where are all these measures? We need to get on with the work. The Houses, as the Legislature, need to be in a position to do their work. A really serious error was made in that we exercised no effective scrutiny over the regulations as they were being made. Oth…

With the vaccination programme, we have a lot to be glad about, but we have a lot to learn from what went wrong in the past year in Ireland. We should not be clapping ourselves on the back too prematurely in the circumstances we now face.

I welcome the Tánaiste to the House, and I agree with him on congratulating Senators Maria Byrne and Horkan on their election. As the Tánaiste said, it is a long time since he has been in this Chamber physically and in the Seanad. There is unfinished business regarding Seanad reform, which we will return to another today. The roadmap outlined yesterday by the Taoiseach, and which the Tánaiste has reiterated in part, is useful and welcome. People's hopes have been raised and there is a sense of confidence that as th…

I thank the Minister for coming to the House and the Chair for listing this Commencement matter. According to the tax and duty manual, under the capital acquisitions tax part 15 on insurance policies and in particular under sections 72 and 73 of the Capital Acquisitions Tax Consolidation Act, it is possible to put in place an insurance policy, the purpose of which is to meet the anticipated capital acquisitions tax which will occur on the death of any individual. The proceeds of the insurance policy do not effectiv…

I thank the Minister of State for his reply. Perhaps the terms in which the matter was phrased were not specifically accurate enough to highlight the problem that I was speaking about. I note that he said that there is not a problem in theory with a child of a likely disponer taking out a life assurance policy providing he or she can show an insurable interest but there is this difficulty of to whom the proceeds of that policy are paid. If they are paid to the inheritor, there are issues as to whether they form par…