Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

There is broad support for a body to deal with these matters and the diagram which was shown is useful for giving examples from other countries of what an electoral commission would look like and the roles it would have. The difficulty is that we are in anti-quango mode at the moment and people will say this is another superquango. There are questions around whether it will take on the role of the Boundary Commission, the Standards in Public Office Commission, those of local authorities or of the franchise section of the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government.

There are divergent views on whether it should be an oversight body or one which has oversight functions and is operational. Given the electoral and registration systems I am not too sure we can cut out local authorities. Some of the people working in local authorities will take exception to some of the criticism on their level of expertise but that is not the issue. Local authorities should be capable of getting people registered to vote and making sure they are not registered twice as it is not too complicated to do. The single biggest issue is the system we have for registration. I have been banging the drum on this for a long time and am very much favour in trying to weed out situations. I am particularly concerned about Deputies on the Government benches talking about meeting people who are on the register six times or stories such as the one about 28 people at one address, a derelict house in County Monaghan.

Examples like that highlight the urgent need to deal with the registration process and try to ensure that people are registered once and once only.

Deputy Bannon is correct that some improvements were made in the North and another party to which I belong insisted very strongly on doing that. In a subsequent election we improved our performance by about 25% or 30%. Having a good register worked well for us, and it is something parties and independents need to fix. I would like to hear some examples of how that might be addressed because it is the single biggest issue. How it is addressed will, in large measure, determine the operational remit of the body. If we are still going to tie it to an address, then the local authority will have to continue playing a major role because it will have some hope of finding out who lives where. The system worked quite well when we had rates collectors who were also intelligence gatherers in terms of the electoral register and there were more local councillors. I am not making any judgment and have my own opinion. We now have 950 rather than 1,450 town and county councillors - some were dual roles and on paper there were over 1,600 seats. Town councillors, in particular, were very good at gathering that kind of information, but that system is no longer in place.

The commission has merit and I would support it. In terms of its role, the jury should be out on registration until we decide how to make the register 100% accurate. Who would appoint the members of the commission? Who currently appoints the members of the Boundary Commission? I am interested in knowing how people are appointed and how they come to their conclusions, such as deciding to saw counties in half, cut off chunks of north Tipperary and lump them in with Offaly and bite off little bits of south Kildare and lump them in with County Laois. The suggestion that it would be accountable to the Oireachtas rather than to a Minister of the day is very good.

The witnesses may have views on the vexed question of funding for political parties. I am somewhat curious as to how a quango or body would fix the problem of gender balance. I have spoken to Members, in particular those elected to the Dáil, as well as those elected to local authorities for the first time last year. Women, in particular, have told me that getting a nomination is not a problem and it is easy enough to get going. It has been shown that when women put themselves forward, they can get elected. The problems for women, as well as men, begin when they are elected and are a result of the hours involved. It was 6.45 a.m. when I got home one morning. That is one of the issues. The roles members of local authorities and Deputies are expected to perform are also an issue.

It was proposed that local government would have a role in terms of election counts. While we have an address based system, I cannot see how local authorities can be taken out of the equation too easily.

I have suggested in the past that this could be linked to PPS numbers. I raised this with the former Minister, Phil Hogan, on many occasions. He made the valid point that we have many more PPS numbers than we have people living in this three quarters of the island of Ireland. In fact, we have as many PPS numbers as we have people living on the entire island of Ireland, despite the fact the Border cuts off six counties. This would indicate that many people who have emigrated, many emigrants who have returned and many people who have died still have PPS numbers. Is it the view of the panel that we could link the registration of voters to the PPS number system? Is there another system we could use to do that?