Percentage of Laws.

Scofflaw

limklad wrote: »

From that report, it seems that 78% of Irish Law in 2008 comes from Brussels. I will need to examine his work to verify it.

I read the politics.ie thread I presume that comes from, but I noted that the poster who started it explicitly set out to justify the 80% figure, and wound up at the pleasantly precise figure of 78%. It's a nice case study in working your way back from your conclusion to finding the supporting "facts", but not really much more.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

Victor wrote: »

No, AFAIK, certain state agencies (I think its only agencies) have the power to issue SIs, but are fairly limited to their own scope. For example the RPA Luas bye-laws are SIs and the IAA schedule of charges are SIs. This are typically put in place at a board or executive level, with no democratic input until after the fact.

Thanks for that - I presume it's agencies established under some form of enabling act that have the power to issue SI's (orders and regulations) within their remit. This is presumably the relevant part of the RPA's enabling Act (the Transport (Railway Infrastructure) Act, 2001):

5.—Every order (other than an order under section 8 ) or regulation made by the Minister under this Act shall be laid before each House of the Oireachtas as soon as may be after it is made, and if a resolution annulling the order or regulation is passed by either such House within the next 21 days on which that House has sat after the order or regulation is laid before it, the order or regulation shall be annulled accordingly, but without prejudice to the validity of anything previously done thereunder.

So, even if your order/regulation is made invalid, you've still got 21 days' use out of it.

cordially,
Scofflaw

limklad

Scofflaw wrote: »

I read the politics.ie thread I presume that comes from, but I noted that the poster who started it explicitly set out to justify the 80% figure, and wound up at the pleasantly precise figure of 78%. It's a nice case study in working your way back from your conclusion to finding the supporting "facts", but not really much more.

cordially,
Scofflaw

I started reading that thread too that iwasfrozen was commenting about.
I had problems in downloading that pdf, until i figured out that I had to start here first http://eulaws.freetzi.com/ then click on the pdf link.

2% less than 80% is not bad especially since that poster left out EU decisions. That poster Thoreau had an initial figure of 61.6% and his gut feeling was 65% to 70% range initially. It was Europeasone (same thread) who stated figures of 78% to 80% figures. Thoreau started investigating it to find out if it true or not.

I started picking S.I's (the One he put in the EU bracket that were not obvious in the heading) at ramdom to check for inaccuraties for inclusion into the EU bracket. So far I haven't found any, I leave it until tomorrow to look at further.

Thoreau Final result of 78% blew a hole in Fine Gael very low Figures of 28% excluding regulations, 43% including EU Regulations.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=61432552&postcount=3

nesf

limklad wrote: »

I started reading that thread too that iwasfrozen was commenting about.
I had problems in downloading that pdf, until i figured out that I had to start here first http://eulaws.freetzi.com/ then click on the pdf link.

2% less than 80% is not bad especially since that poster left out EU decisions. That poster Thoreau had an initial figure of 61.6% and his gut feeling was 65% to 70% range initially. It was Europeasone (same thread) who stated figures of 78% to 80% figures. Thoreau started investigating it to find out if it true or not.

I started picking S.I's (the One he put in the EU bracket that were not obvious in the heading) at ramdom to check for inaccuraties for inclusion into the EU bracket. So far I haven't found any, I leave it until tomorrow to look at further.

Thoreau Final result of 78% blew a hole in Fine Gael very low Figures of 28% excluding regulations, 43% including EU Regulations.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=61432552&postcount=3

I think the issue comes down to how exactly you define law and what you include. Also the counting issue rears it's head, does 3 different sets of minor changes to a single set of regulations in a year count as one law or three? You can argue for either option depending on whether you want the number higher or lower. Regardless it's a meaningless stat. What matters isn't the number of laws but their importance. The EU can't legislate in most of the highly important areas here which is something to bear in mind.

limklad

nesf wrote: »

I think the issue comes down to how exactly you define law and what you include. Also the counting issue rears it's head, does 3 different sets of minor changes to a single set of regulations in a year count as one law or three? You can argue for either option depending on whether you want the number higher or lower. Regardless it's a meaningless stat. What matters isn't the number of laws but their importance. The EU can't legislate in most of the highly important areas here which is something to bear in mind.

We Voted in EU Treaties to apply them as part of Irish Law so they do count. No matter how trivial it is.

nesf

limklad wrote: »

We Voted in EU Treaties to apply them as part of Irish Law so they do count. No matter how trivial it is.

You miss my point. All laws are not equal in power or scope. Does it make sense to you to equate one piece of legislation which sets the minimum acceptable standard for the shape and size of bananas to a piece of criminal legislation laying out situations where juryless trials are permitted? That is what such percentage comparisons entail. It's a silly way to compare things.

Scofflaw

nesf wrote: »

I think the issue comes down to how exactly you define law and what you include. Also the counting issue rears it's head, does 3 different sets of minor changes to a single set of regulations in a year count as one law or three? You can argue for either option depending on whether you want the number higher or lower. Regardless it's a meaningless stat. What matters isn't the number of laws but their importance. The EU can't legislate in most of the highly important areas here which is something to bear in mind.

What might well be interesting is a study of the triviality of such regulations. I'm not sure this Regulation, for example, concerns me very much:

Council Regulation (EC) No 1355/2008 of 18 December 2008 imposing a definitive anti-dumping duty and collecting definitively the provisional duty imposed on imports of certain prepared or preserved citrus fruits (namely mandarins, etc.) originating in the People’s Republic of China

Or this one:

Council Regulation (EC) No 1354/2008 of 18 December 2008 amending Regulation (EC) No 1628/2004 imposing a definitive countervailing duty on imports of certain graphite electrode systems originating in India and Regulation (EC) No 1629/2004 imposing a definitive anti-dumping duty on imports of certain graphite electrode systems originating in India

Counting those as the equivalent of an Act of the Oireachtas establishing, for example, the Railway procurement Agency, doesn't seem to me to be a very worthwhile comparison. Most of the regulations seem to me to be very regulatory - keeping the Common Market ticking along.

You'd need some kind of scoring system, I suspect, to make the comparison meaningful - how important is this regulation? How important is that regulation? How important is this Act? Unless of course there's some general principle that applies...

One should perhaps also, as I've said before, and as has been discussed here, consider the volume of things like bye-laws and local law. Unfortunately, there really doesn't seem to be any central record available, although one presumes (perhaps erroneously) that there is such a thing.

On balance, I would say that the 78% being offered here is the absolute highest figure that can be obtained, and it has been obtained by giving equal weight to important Acts and EU regulations of very minimal impact, resulting in a claim that is all but meaningless as regards the EU citizen or business. The Fine Gael figure of 43% strikes me as far more reasonable as a representation of effect, although I suspect it is equally mechanistic.

Would people be up for the tedious task of determining how 'important' the regulations and Acts involved for any specific year are?

cordially,
Scofflaw

nesf

Scofflaw wrote: »

Would people be up for the tedious task of determining how 'important' the regulations and Acts involved for any specific year are?

cordially,
Scofflaw

I'd say that would tax even your saintly level of patience.

molloyjh

Scofflaw wrote: »

What might well be interesting is a study of the triviality of such regulations. I'm not sure this Regulation, for example, concerns me very much:



Or this one:



Counting those as the equivalent of an Act of the Oireachtas establishing, for example, the Railway procurement Agency, doesn't seem to me to be a very worthwhile comparison. Most of the regulations seem to me to be very regulatory - keeping the Common Market ticking along.

You'd need some kind of scoring system, I suspect, to make the comparison meaningful - how important is this regulation? How important is that regulation? How important is this Act? Unless of course there's some general principle that applies...

One should perhaps also, as I've said before, and as has been discussed here, consider the volume of things like bye-laws and local law. Unfortunately, there really doesn't seem to be any central record available, although one presumes (perhaps erroneously) that there is such a thing.

On balance, I would say that the 78% being offered here is the absolute highest figure that can be obtained, and it has been obtained by giving equal weight to important Acts and EU regulations of very minimal impact, resulting in a claim that is all but meaningless as regards the EU citizen or business. The Fine Gael figure of 43% strikes me as far more reasonable as a representation of effect, although I suspect it is equally mechanistic.

Would people be up for the tedious task of determining how 'important' the regulations and Acts involved for any specific year are?

cordially,
Scofflaw

The original analysis on this was done on p.ie and I asked the question of relevance there, but there was no appetite to discuss this, let alone reviewing the data.

I did make a start on it, but it is incredibly tedious!

limklad

nesf wrote: »

You miss my point. All laws are not equal in power or scope. Does it make sense to you to equate one piece of legislation which sets the minimum acceptable standard for the shape and size of bananas to a piece of criminal legislation laying out situations where juryless trials are permitted? That is what such percentage comparisons entail. It's a silly way to compare things.

Laws may not be equal in punishment, they are all equal in how they are created. Our EU Obligations when we ratified (by which we voting on) EC/EU treaties in which our Politicians negotiated by making them equal to National Law made them very relevance no matter how trivial people make them out to be. You me and everybody in this country who voted Yes to previous EC/EU treaties made them very relevant to our lives by given them equal standing.

nesf

limklad wrote: »

Laws may not be equal in punishment, they are all equal in how they are created. Our EU Obligations when we ratified (by which we voting on) EC/EU treaties in which our Politicians negotiated by making them equal to National Law made them very relevance no matter how trivial people make them out to be. You me and everybody in this country who voted Yes to previous EC/EU treaties made them very relevant to our lives by given them equal standing.

Of course they have equal standing, otherwise they would be overwritten by any Irish law that dealt with the same area making the process pointless. Are you honestly arguing that we should count trivial laws and far reaching laws with huge impacts as one in the same?

worldrepublic

The main thing is to prioritise certain types of law, for example corporate law, so as to empower corporations and also transnational bodies dealing with matters of law. Corporations are the way forward, and play such a key role within the fabric of society that governmental power, as appropriate, can become bound up with large commercial operations.

K-9

limklad wrote: »

Laws may not be equal in punishment, they are all equal in how they are created. Our EU Obligations when we ratified (by which we voting on) EC/EU treaties in which our Politicians negotiated by making them equal to National Law made them very relevance no matter how trivial people make them out to be. You me and everybody in this country who voted Yes to previous EC/EU treaties made them very relevant to our lives by given them equal standing.

Just to give a different slant on this, read the p.ie thread ages ago so don't know if it was brought up.

Maybe the point here is: why do we only produce 22% of our own laws?

In a perverted sort of way, maybe it's a criticism of our Dail and doesn't say a lot about the EU? If anything maybe this is a good thing about the EU?

Scofflaw

K-9 wrote: »

Just to give a different slant on this, read the p.ie thread ages ago so don't know if it was brought up.

Maybe the point here is: why do we only produce 22% of our own laws?

In a perverted sort of way, maybe it's a criticism of our Dail and doesn't say a lot about the EU? If anything maybe this is a good thing about the EU?

We don't produce only 22% of our own laws! Even using the figures given in the PDF (or on that thread) only 16% of our Acts and 32% of our central government SIs are European in origin. Adding in EU Regulations as a mass of "laws" equivalent to those is an appalling comparison of apples and straight bananas.

When someone says "80% of our laws come from Brussels" there is a very clear implication involved - that the course of Irish life is being set by the EU rather than by Ireland, and that is clearly not the case when to reach that figure we must add in EU regulations, the majority of which have virtually no impact whatsoever on the course of Irish life.

The majority of EU regulations are just that - trade regulations. Yes, they have legal effect here, but to describe as "law" and equivalent to an Act of the Oireachtas a trade regulation that sets the tariff on graphite products of Indian origin is ridiculous.

cordially,
Scofflaw

K-9

Scofflaw wrote: »

We don't produce only 22% of our own laws! Even using the figures given in the PDF (or on that thread) only 16% of our Acts and 32% of our central government SIs are European in origin. Adding in EU Regulations as a mass of "laws" equivalent to those is an appalling comparison of apples and straight bananas.

When someone says "80% of our laws come from Brussels" there is a very clear implication involved - that the course of Irish life is being set by the EU rather than by Ireland, and that is clearly not the case when to reach that figure we must add in EU regulations, the majority of which have virtually no impact whatsoever on the course of Irish life.

The majority of EU regulations are just that - trade regulations. Yes, they have legal effect here, but to describe as "law" and equivalent to an Act of the Oireachtas a trade regulation that sets the tariff on graphite products of Indian origin is ridiculous.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Indeed Scofflaw. Just running with this!

Just going with the point that if IF 22 % of our laws are Irish laws (going on 78% are EU) maybe the point isn't why are 78% EU laws, but why are only 22% supposedly Irish?

Scofflaw

K-9 wrote: »

Indeed Scofflaw. Just running with this!

Just going with the point that if IF 22 % of our laws are Irish laws (going on 78% are EU) maybe the point isn't why are 78% EU laws, but why are only 22% supposedly Irish?

In essence, it's because we're talking about two completely different streams of output, with two entirely different aims. On the one hand, we have the laws which govern Ireland and steer the course of the Irish republic. On the other, we have the trade regulations required to keep the common market functioning.

In the first of those streams, Irish law predominates - 70% of the laws that govern Ireland are purely Irish in origin.

In the second of those streams, only EU regulations exist - the common market is not governed by national legislation at all, and 100% of the output is EU.

You cannot meaningfully conflate the two, but it is that conflation that is used to produce the 22% Irish figure. There will never be Irish legislation for the Common Market, so there will always be one of the streams that is 100% EU in origin. Since that stream of output is devoted to the management of a common market area encompassing something like a third of the world's trade, it is unsurprisingly a very large stream.

cordially,
Scofflaw

K-9

But still we protest at how our Govt. doesn't legislate.

Scofflaw

K-9 wrote: »

But still we protest at how our Govt. doesn't legislate.

Do we really want or need our government to put out more legislation? They put out 25 Acts and 607 Statutory Instruments last year - a total of 2953 A4 pages of legislation*. Given the Dáil sits for only 90 days in plenary session, that means that it was supposed to consider 33 pages of legal text per day.

For comparison, the Lisbon Treaty is about 200 pages. Now, given the amount of argument that 200 pages of the Treaty has generated, to the general satisfaction of relatively few people, how much debate ought 150 times that amount be given? Is the Dáil capable of giving it? And would increased legislative output make sense?

cordially,
Scofflaw

*based on a text word count of all SIs and Acts from 2008 stripped of explanatory notes etc, assuming 2750 characters per A4 page.

nesf

K-9 wrote: »

But still we protest at how our Govt. doesn't legislate.

We don't protest at how they don't legislate in general we generally protest when we want to see or change a specific piece of legislation.

K-9

nesf wrote: »

We don't protest at how they don't legislate in general we generally protest when we want to see or change a specific piece of legislation.

Yes, but I'm thinking more of the Dail sitting twiddling its thumbs for a couple of days with no legislation to debate or pass, as happened earlier this year.

Scofflaw

K-9 wrote: »

Yes, but I'm thinking more of the Dail sitting twiddling its thumbs for a couple of days with no legislation to debate or pass, as happened earlier this year.

I suspect that's more the result of the government's guillotining of debates.

cordially,
Scofflaw

worldrepublic

Scofflaw wrote: »

I suspect that's more the result of the government's guillotining of debates.

cordially,
Scofflaw

Idle hands are the devil's workshop

Victor

Victor wrote: »

No, AFAIK, certain state agencies (I think its only agencies) have the power to issue SIs, but are fairly limited to their own scope. For example the RPA Luas bye-laws are SIs and the IAA schedule of charges are SIs. This are typically put in place at a board or executive level, with no democratic input until after the fact.

IAA Obstacles to Aircraft in Flight Order 215 of 2005 - Signed by 2 directors.

S.I. No. 100/2004 — Light Railway (Regulation of Travel and Use) Bye-Laws 2004 - Signed by Chairperson and Chief Executive

Scofflaw

Victor wrote: »

IAA Obstacles to Aircraft in Flight Order 215 of 2005 - Signed by 2 directors.

S.I. No. 100/2004 — Light Railway (Regulation of Travel and Use) Bye-Laws 2004 - Signed by Chairperson and Chief Executive

A good example of delegated powers, subject to democratic oversight rather than initiative.

cordially,
Scofflaw

K-9

Scofflaw wrote: »

I suspect that's more the result of the government's guillotining of debates.

cordially,
Scofflaw

No, more the the lack of legislation to debate, which links in with the low percentage of Irish law passed (supposing that is correct!)

Scofflaw

K-9 wrote: »

No, more the the lack of legislation to debate, which links in with the low percentage of Irish law passed (supposing that is correct!)

Well, no, I don't think that's the case - in 2008, there were 25 Acts and 607 Statutory Instruments - a total of 2953 A4 pages of legislation. Given the Dáil sits for only 90 days in plenary session, that means that it was supposed to consider 33 pages of legal text per day.

That's an Act to debate every 3.5 Dail days, and 6-7 SIs per day. I don't think that's a lack of legislation, although to be fair it's nothing like the European Parliament's workload.

I doubt it's changed much either - in 1970, to pick a random pre-EU year, there were also 25 Acts, but only 315 SIs.

cordially,
Scofflaw

K-9

Scofflaw wrote: »

That's an Act to debate every 3.5 Dail days, and 6-7 SIs per day. I don't think that's a lack of legislation, although to be fair it's nothing like the European Parliament's workload.

Thanks for that.

I think that is the point I'm trying to make.

This 70% or whatever the aim is, is more down to the workload and types of law. The actual content and significance is less sexy than the superficial appearance!

Scofflaw

K-9 wrote: »

Thanks for that.

I think that is the point I'm trying to make.

This 70% or whatever the aim is, is more down to the workload and types of law. The actual content and significance is less sexy than the superficial appearance!

There I think we're in agreement. Back in 1970, Ireland produced roughly the same amount of domestic law as now. There was no regulation of the common market then, because it didn't exist.

Now, on the other hand, we have two sources of legislation, which are entirely separate in meaning - Irish domestic law, which remains pretty much as it was, with a minor input from the EU, and common market regulation, which is something that simply didn't exist before the EU, because there was no such thing as the common market.

Adding the two together to claim that Irish law is now "made in Brussels" is a dreadful sleight of hand.

cordially,
Scofflaw

limklad

I see that over in P.ie that they seem to be coming up approx 80% of Irish Law is of EU origin.

http://www.politics.ie/lisbon-treaty/83224-what-percentage-laws-brussels-28.html

They Seem to have done 2003, 2004 and 2008
Limerickjohn Results are
2003: 81.55% of laws were of EU origin
2004: 77.09% of laws were of EU origin
2005 Limerickjohn is processing results, he has Irish Acts and S.I.'s done and now looking at EU Regulations.

Thoreau results are
2008: 77.96% of laws were of EU origin

Scofflaw

limklad wrote: »

I see that over in P.ie that they seem to be coming up approx 80% of Irish Law is of EU origin.

They Seem to have done 2003, 2004 and 2008
Limerickjohn Results are
2003: 81.55% of laws were of EU origin
2004: 77.09% of laws were of EU origin
2005 Limerickjohn is processing results, he has Irish Acts and S.I.'s done and now looking at EU Regulations.

Thoreau results are
2008: 77.96% of laws were of EU origin

I've pointed out before that the poster in question set out, quite explicitly, to 'prove' the 80% figure. To no amazement, that's exactly what he has 'proved'.

A waste of time for all concerned - and be careful about pimping politics.ie on boards.ie.

cordially,
Scofflaw