Dr. Adrian Kavanagh:

It is an interesting question. In regard to the constituency commission, the last report on local election boundaries was prepared by a commission comprising five or six people who were given six months to redraw boundaries across the country. I was on one of the two previous committees for the 2008 redrawing of local election boundaries. We had the same amount of time. The committee with which I was involved was only examining Dublin and the cities. From my experience, we had sufficient time for our examination, but we still made mistakes. There is more scope to review the proposals made by the two local election committees and the constituency commission. Perhaps we should consider the model used in the United Kingdom, whereby instead of the commission or committee of committees producing a final report, at some stage early in the process, even before public submissions are invited, two or three options are set out in a draft report. If, for example, there is a proposal to merge County Offaly with part of north Tipperary, there would be an opportunity to respond.

The other problem with the commission and the committees is that, either because of the number of voters or the level of work involved, it becomes a numbers game when it comes to local elections. There might not be sufficient people in County Laois for a three seat constituency and, therefore, the constituency would simply be expanded to include the additional numbers. This is something that might require further thought. The current guideline is that every constituency should have a population per Deputy that is within 5% of the national average, although in practice that figure has varied as high as 9% in Mayo East in 1983. This is something that probably has not been given sufficient thought. My sense of the constituency commission is that it puts greater emphasis on proportionality over continuity of place based on county based elements. I understand the current general election boundaries breach 15 or 16 county boundaries. Perhaps we need to discuss the extent to which proportionality should be seen as more important than maintaining county boundaries. Perhaps there is more scope to preserve county boundaries in constituencies, even if it means the population is 10% too large.