The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) (Amendment) Bill 2022 was published on the 30th of May 2002 and the Second Stage debates concluded in the Dail on the 2nd of June 2022. The Bill has now been referred to the Dail’s Select Committee.

Section 51 of the Bill contains an important amendment to the Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act 2015 (the “Principal Act”) in that it now creates a new two-stage registration process for enduring powers. Section 51 amends the Principal Act by the insertion of a new section into section 68 of the Principal Act which deals with the registration of EPAs. Under the new regime, a donor must register the EPA no later than 3 months after the date of execution/creation of the EPA. The new initial registration procedure will allow a donor to make changes to the EPA before the second registration step without revoking the EPA, so it introduces a degree of flexibility here.

The envisaged system then contains the usual process of registration of the EPA once the donor loses capacity and the EPA will come into effect in the normal course on that notification. However, the registration procedure has been considerably fleshed out in new ss. 71A – 71D of the Principal Act introduced by s. 54 of the Bill.

The second step of registration has been expanded so that the attorney on registration of the EPA must not only notify the notice parties but a range of other persons including the spouse/civil partner/co-habitant of the donor, any co-decision maker or other parties. The rights of the Director of the Decision Support Service and such third parties to object to the registration have also been expanded by these new provisions.

I attach a link to the new bill and the debates page from the Bills website.

https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2022/59/

Hope this helps and if you have any queries on capacity issues, will drafting or probate please do not hesitate to email me at ckelly@hcalaw.ie