Darren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I wish to make the same point. Deputy Whitmore says she does not know how we have ended up here with a rhetorical piece, but if anything this is par for the course. We are bolting on a piece that is obviously an afterthought. There was a decision made that we need to reconfigure and shift responsibility from one Department to the other. There is merit in that, but it is safe to say we in Opposition have often found ourselves in the position where the Government brings in rushed legislation, which it is trying to drive through very quickly, and it does not want pre-legislative scrutiny of it while making Seanad amendments that are very significant. We have had, in this Dáil term, the experience of legislation coming forward as emergency legislation drafted in a particular way because the Government says we need to do it this way because if we do it any other way it will cause a problem for us in the future. The exact opposite has come to fruition, where we have had to come back with second and third redrafts of legislation and subsequent primary legislation because the initial piece was not well enough considered, well enough thought-through or well enough crafted. That is accepting the point that during this Dáil term we have found ourselves in difficult positions responding to crises here and crises there, but this is about a matter of good practice.

In this instance, it is also quite fundamental to what I would have thought is one of the Government's top priorities, namely, the infrastructure, architecture and apparatus to deliver on offshore wind and to do it in the right and sustainable way. If that is a major priority which I hope is shared across Government and across these Houses, then we should do it in a very different way. It is very frustrating that we find ourselves in this position. It is frustrating that we are doing this piece but not the marine protected areas legislation and we are also still waiting on those DMAPs. It is frustrating on this side of the House to constantly be put in this position. The Minister of State must acknowledge it is a bad way to do business.

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