No, we would not.

No, it would not. If there are lies-----

I am doing something unusual this morning; I am opposing the Order of Business. I do so because I object to the Government's disgusting habit of constantly proposing, and implementing, the guillotining of legislation in this House. It happened again on Committee Stage of the Affordable Housing Bill on Friday, 4 June. Many amendments were not discussed, including one of mine. We have been promised so often that the guillotine would only be used sparingly, but that is not what is happening. It would be interesting to…

I, too, compliment former Senator, Pádraig Ó Céidigh, on the excellent initiative he brought to the House in this legislation, which puts on a statutory footing what was already an offence under common law. This body of work is a credit to him. It is good that the Government accepted it and that amendments were made in the Dáil on Committee Stage. Indeed, at the time this was being discussed in the Seanad, former Senator Ó Céidigh credited the advocacy of the Irish SME Association on this issue because it was clear…

Very good. I will conclude on this but I want to make the point clearly-----

I will. I will just finish the point clearly because the Minister of State is present. I have given him the example of another non-quasi-judicial body, namely, the HSE, and in the context of the nursing home support scheme-----

There are stringent provisions against making false or misleading statements to the HSE, with a penalty of up to three months in prison and a fine of €5,000 for knowingly or recklessly giving false or misleading information in an application under the scheme. The point I am making is that the Government has to stop coming into the House and giving cooked-up and on-the-hoof replies to legitimate questions about-----

It is not extraneous to this extent------

We are discussing legislation that makes it a criminal offence to give false and misleading information in court proceedings but we have a body that is set up to reduce insurance awards------

------and to save money, yet the Government is fatuously opposing or denying there is a need to amend the law to make it an offence to give false and misleading information to PIAB. It makes no difference that PIAB will only determine a matter where liability is not in issue. There can be situations involving conspiracy between the person making a claim and the putative defendant of that claim. There are all sorts of situations in which harm could be done to other parties and to the public by people making false cl…

-----concerned about the rights of private parties? That is a completely unacceptable state of affairs.

I am raising the issue because it is relevant to the issue of giving false and misleading claims in the context of disputes that could end up before the courts, but in this case do not end up there. It seems to me that the public good is not being served------

-----and I want to give the Minister of State another chance to consider the matter.

I welcome the Minister. There is always a balance to be identified between an agenda to remove what are objectively obstacles to people's equal participation in society and the economy, which one must always support, and where this drifts into the area of social engineering, which I have an issue with, when we start to tell people and families how to live and arrange their lives, identifying some choices as virtuous and others as less virtuous. I tend to oppose that. I approached this legislation with that tension …

I thank the Senator.

There are good choices and bad choices.

I join the Cathaoirleach in congratulating our Danish friends today. These days, when colonisers and attempted colonisers are being brought again before the bar of history, perhaps it is time that we asked the Danish Government for an apology for the appalling murder of Brian Boru. The fact that he might have had some Irish co-conspirators or there might have been someone involved is no excuse. No doubt if James Joyce was here he would say, "Viking me Aarhus". On to more serious matters. There is light at the end o…

Well-deserved tributes have been paid to the great Bob Dylan in recent days as he has reached that great milestone of his 80th birthday, but another legend, an Irish one, deserves to be remembered here too, and that is the great Barney Curley, who went to his reward in recent days. He had a particular connection with these Houses. We have important debates that we need to have on gambling and changes that are needed in order to protect people, so it may seem unusual to extol the achievements of a famous gambler, bu…

The Minister may recall that in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan met President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, he began with a famous line, saying that he would let Gorbachev know why he could not trust him. That is a question that I find myself having to ask the Government at this point as we discuss emergency powers in this House yet again. Throughout this crisis, I have been among many who have said that given the scale of the threat to public health, we had to trust the Government to make decisions in the public in…

Will the Senator take a point?