Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

Articles by Shane Coleman in The Sunday Tribune a few years ago drew attention to how overstated our register of electors was. Those articles showed the potential for manipulating an election given that there were more people on the register than there were electors. After that field work was done an initiative was taken to correct it. The door-to-door arrangement might have worked fine when there was a reason for a council official to knock on every door. That tended to be at a time when people paid their domestic rates by cash to the rate collector - it might even have been done on an incremental basis. However, there is no reason now and the local government system would not have the capacity for that kind of door-to-door arrangement to take place. It is essential that we consider how we might get a correct register of electors. I believe the PPS system would be a good system. On Committee Stage we discussed the number of PPS numbers relative to the population. Clearly the number of people over 18 would be smaller than that again. If that is to be taken on board, what could be done to clean up the register of electors database?

I ask the Minister to outline what is intended to deal with the issue of people who are on holidays when an election takes place. People express pure disbelief when they discover they will miss out on voting because they have planned a holiday and had no prior knowledge of when an election was likely to take place.

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