Fianna Fail has sought legal advice over a row about speaking rights in the Dail, as the stalemate over the issue continues.
Taoiseach Micheal Martin said talks to try to resolve the situation will continue but added that a lot of “simplistic utterances” have been made about the contentious issue.
He said that his party has commissioned senior counsel opinion on the matter.
Government and opposition parties remain at odds over speaking rights, with attempts to find an agreement becoming more difficult.
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Central to the row was a move to allocate opposition speaking time to some independents who had been involved in government formation talks.
Four of those independents had joined a technical group, which is a mechanism designed to allow opposition TDs to sit in groupings to gain an allocation of speaking time.
A virtual meeting of the Dail reform committee on Thursday night ended with no resolution. The committee is meeting on Friday to try to reach an agreement.
Asked whether he believe it will be resolved, Mr Martin said: “I would hope so. We will keep talking. We want to try and resolve this.
“Could I say at the outset, I think there’s been a lot of, I think, simplistic utterances about this entire situation.
“Our party has commissioned senior counsel opinion on this just to create a context because there’s a notion going around that opposition and government, you can’t be in either, that’s far too simplistic because go back to 1932 and from then onwards, people from opposition benches have been supporting different governments in different ways.
“For example, the confidence supply agreement between the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael from 2016 to 2020, if what Sinn Fein is saying and People Before Profit are saying that you can’t be in opposition and support government or be involved in discussions around the programme for government or budget, we would not have had confidence and supply.
“That programme for government was influenced by the main opposition party, the budgets were influenced by the two-to-one rule about two times expenditure versus tax relief.
“Into the future, we’ve got to be careful not to be overly prescriptive about what a Dail might do, or members of the Dail might do.
“I think, an attempt is to unearth what has been practice.”
He said that the Dail Standing Orders allow the group to be formed.
“It’s far more, I would argue, subtle and nuanced, and a bit more complex than all of the argumentation and commentary that we’ve had over the last while. That’s my opinion,” Mr Martin told reporters in Cork on Friday.
“We will still work to get a compromise. We’ll work very hard to do that because we want the Dail to work in an orderly manner. But I think fundamental principles have to be upheld as well and cannot be jettisoned in the interests of what I might consider short-term political goals.”
Earlier, Paul Murphy, of People Before Profit, said that “everyone knows” the group are backbench Government TDs but claimed there is a proposal to treat them as opposition.
“There was a lot of talk at the meeting of all the hard work the chief whip has done over the past week. That must have been back and forth with Michael Lowry because there was no engagement with anyone on the opposition to try to find a compromise or a way forward,” Mr Murphy said.
“All the indications yesterday is that they were not for turning. They’re absolutely committed that the Lowry group will get Leaders questions and priority questions.
“Obviously, Michael Lowry has been described in the media as the Kingmaker of the government. From watching what happens at the Dail reform committee, he increasingly looks like the Pied Piper of the government.
“He says at the meeting yesterday, I will not compromise on Leaders questions and priority questions for my group and then the government chimes in to say they also will not compromise on Leaders questions and priority questions for his group.
“It’s an incredible thing to see play out. It’s a direct contradiction to what was agreed last week in terms of finding a resolution. To be clear from the opposition side, there is not some attempt to deny Michael Lowry and his group the right to speak.”