Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy McLoughlin for his questions. On his comment regarding updating of the register and checktheregister.ie, the difficulty with all of the local authorities doing this individually is that there is no real-time register. A person could apply today to the local authority for registration but his or her name will only appear on the draft register next November. There is no public body operating in such a way that applications, even for a medical card, are completed within three days. When an application for registration is submitted, even to the supplementary register, this will not be confirmed until such time as the hard copy of the register is made available the week before polling day. There is need for a centralised live system from which people could find out within, say, 24 hours, that their application has been successful. That is important.

On the Deputy's point regarding the inclusion of people who were not in the country on the supplementary register for the last local election, I thought that process had been tightened up, because it has been the case for the past couple of years now that applications for inclusion on the supplementary register must be stamped by a garda. Perhaps local authorities were being a bit lenient in accepting forms from people they know through their work in those local authorities. That should be easily verified. In cases in which calls were made to a house and there was no response, despite the fact that there were ten people at that address on the register, the matter was investigated by the local authority following the local election. There may have been no prosecutions, but the matter was followed up. There are lessons to be learned in that regard.

On the boundary charges, while I accept that people will have differing views on this matter, I believe this function should remain separate from the commission, because where people working on the administration of elections on an ongoing basis are involved in the drawing up of boundaries, personal or administrative convenience could come into the equation too much. There are many difficulties in our current system, the biggest being the change in population, which people do not like. There are more Polish people living in Ireland than there are Leitrim people living in Leitrim. That is a brutal statement, but it is a fact. There are nearly more Polish people living in Laois than there are people living in Leitrim. I can understand a county feeling it has the right and entitlement, because of a geographic county boundary, to be part of a unique constituency. However, if we are to count people rather than county boundaries, this will not always be possible. I do not have the answer to the problem highlighted by the Deputy. I know there are four constituencies in the county concerned. To me, that is wrong. People should have an association with whoever they are electing. There was probably a better way of addressing the issues in that area. While it might have been necessary to combine two areas, it was not necessary to combine four. I share the Deputy's concern but I do not have an answer for him.