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What’s another year?
In a carefully calculated Friday afternoon news dump which will be lost in all the financial excitement, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has added at least 6 months to his earlier timetable for a Victims’ Rights Bill. This is a sequel to his killing of Alan Shatter‘s private member’s bill on the same subject back in June, a sequence which saw Ahern not bother to show up in the Dail to extend a supposed terrorism emergency and then pre-empt Shatter’s bill with an announcement for the media a few days before the scheduled debate on Shatter’s bill.
His favourite talking point for blocking Shatter’s bill was the claim that it was copied from similar legislation in New Zealand — as if drawing on experience in another common law country facing similar issues was an outrage. Perhaps the government prefers to pay expensive consultants to write up the foreign experience for them. But anyway, today’s announcement from Ahern is that contrary to what sounded like a promise to the Dail of an act by Spring, the actual date is 12 months from now. Around the time of the Lisbon II referendum!
he said he would publish a bill in the spring – he is now saying he will have that bill ENACTED within ayear. very different things.
pledge to publish here http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/Dermot%20Ahern%20announces%20Justice%20for%20Victims%20Initiative
Which says that they would publish legislation “early next year”. He already had the various commission reports that he needed on his desk when he made the June announcement. Now he’s only promising “the heads of the bill” “by the end of the year”. That’s a lot of slippage to get a law by September 2009. They can speed up legislation when they want to. Note for instance that there is already the new limit on deposit insurance despite the fact that it will need implementing legislation. I bet they get it through before the victims rights bill.