Firearms Act Restatement to finally go ahead?

Sparks

From the Irish Times today, emphasis is mine:

AG to unveil reports on law reform

CAROL COULTER

ATTORNEY General Paul Gallagher will launch two Law Reform Commission (LRC) documents this evening aimed at making the law more accessible.

The first is the LRC report on statute law restatement. This process involves integrating amendments into the original Acts, so that the most up-to-date version of the law can be read in a single document. This has the potential to save huge amounts of time as, at the moment, especially with much-amended Acts, lawyers have to trawl through several different documents to find out what the law actually states.

In July last year the LRC published its consultation paper on the subject, following responsibility for restatement being transferred to it from the Office of the Attorney General.

This was followed by a consultation process and the receipt of submissions.

The report being published today contains legislation to be included in the commission's first Programme of Restatement, covering law for restatement in 2008/2009.

This programme will cover the Freedom of Information Act 2007, which has close to 100 amendments; the Data Protection Acts, which have over 70; the Prevention of Corruption Acts; and the Criminal Procedure Act 1967.

Areas of legislation with multiple Acts to be covered include ethics in public office legislation; firearms legislation; statute of limitations legislation (which is made up of 13 Acts); employment leave legislation; proceeds of crime legislation and equality legislation.

Updates of four existing restatements, carried out already by the Office of the Attorney General, will also be included.

The LRC will also launch a consultation paper on a legislation directory this evening. This is a publicly available database of all primary legislation and some secondary legislation, which will document modifications made to primary legislation by later legislation. The current database is at www.irishstatutebook.ie.

Responsibility for this has also been transferred from the Office of the Attorney General to the LRC, and the consultation paper considers how the directory can best serve its user base.

Proposals for its improvement include more timely updates, the inclusion of comprehensive commencement information for Acts, and the association of secondary legislation with their parent Acts.

© 2008 The Irish Times

The idea of a restatement is not that the law will be changed in any way, but that someone will start with the Firearms Act 1925 and then apply each and every amendment from statute, eu directive, SI, whatever and produce one single document at the end of it, which will then legally supercede all the stuff that came before; so instead of the Firearms Act 1925, as amended, you get the Firearms Act, 2009. Which is a hell of a lot easier to read for a start. It should also highlight problems with the legislation which are caused by that amendment process, such as conflicting definitions that aren't noticed until you actually apply all the amendments in one place, and that sort of thing.
We have two unofficial ones already which myself and RRPC put together, but this would be an actual, citable-in-court, legal document.

More details later tonight hopefully...

(oh, and the bit at the very end about commencement information is critical as well because right now, any restatement has to look at what legislation was commenced, not just what legislation was passed by the Dail; and it turns out that that's done via SIs 90% of the time and there's no single place where SIs are published. Iris Oifigial often carries notices of SIs being signed, but not always the content. You wind up chasing after departments looking for the relevant SI a lot of the time. So this is a good thing).

IRLConor

Sparks wrote: »

(oh, and the bit at the very end about commencement information is critical as well because right now, any restatement has to look at what legislation was commenced, not just what legislation was passed by the Dail; and it turns out that that's done via SIs 90% of the time and there's no single place where SIs are published. Iris Oifigial often carries notices of SIs being signed, but not always the content. You wind up chasing after departments looking for the relevant SI a lot of the time. So this is a good thing).

There are two places which have most of the SIs:

All the SIs from 1922 to the middle of 2005 are here: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/statutory.html

All the SIs from 2007 to present are here: http://www.attorneygeneral.ie/esi/esi_index.html

From the end of June 2005 until the end of 2006 you're on your own. :rolleyes:

Sparks

That's most of them, well after they're published, but there's no place where they're all published. Which is insane, since they directly affect primary legislation as well as being secondary legislation. It's having rules you have to follow or go to jail, but not ever actually having to print them in one place so people can check them. It's madness Ted!

Vegeta

Sweet, I wish all legislation was like this.

rrpc

This is great news, and long overdue. It appears that they are working to a very tight timeframe as well. As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to restate the firearms acts, they're quite frankly a mess and as Sparks said there's the whole SI mares nest which makes things even more confusing.

It will be immediately apparent to the LRC when they start the process, how much of the law is contradictory and unclear.