Mr. Seán Donnelly:

I will make some general points. I believe an electoral commission should be set up, and it could be done fairly quickly once the staffing and so on is in place.

The very first thing to do is to get a decent website up and running. One can do a lot of the stuff that should be transparent in Irish politics. I refer to historical data on elections and other such information. Irish politics is full of myths. The register came up as an issue a few years ago when a by-election turnout was dreadful. People panicked and said the turnout was dropping and people were losing interest in politics, which never happened in this country before, and all of that nonsense. The obvious thing was that the electoral register was getting out of control. People now have much more mobility. People who were born in Donegal had a vote there, but if they went to UCG they had a vote there and if they were working in Dublin they had a vote there. They voted once, which meant there was 100% turnout, but because they were on the register three times it was considered to be a 33% turnout. That has been the problem. The solution was to check the register. I remember thinking it would be great because I would see every register, but the way the website works is that one puts a name in and one is told whether that name is on the register. Big deal. That is the most ridiculous thing ever. It is nonsense. We were not serious about that.

It is obvious from the hearings that the biggest item is the electoral register. It is a huge issue. If one considers the number of times it has been mentioned at the meetings, one can see it is way ahead of anything else. It is obviously very important and it must be treated with the utmost respect. Deputy Coppinger referred to getting people on the register and removing duplication. That is extremely important. It is not good enough in this day and age if we are making decisions based on inaccurate facts in terms of turnout and such issues. We must have transparency. We must have all of the figures available to us.

I remember some crowd did a survey in this country a few years ago and reported it to be one of the most corrupt countries. I wondered what they were talking about. They quoted certain figures. A couple of weeks later they withdrew the statement because it was based on inaccurate facts and they did not stand up when challenged.

It has been said that transfers decide who gets elected. Transfers do not decide elections. The first preference vote mostly decides elections. It is only in 10% of the seats that the transfers play a big part. There is all this mythology about elections and the fact that the turnout is dropping. We must get real. The hearings have shown how important the register of electors is. It is definitely not good enough at the moment. It does not work and it is giving us the wrong facts and figures. I accept there are problems with PPS numbers. I do not mind what way they do it.

The census is a system that works. It is carried out by the Central Statistics Office. It works because it is done by a central body. It deals with a population in this country of 4,588,252. We are a small country. Could one imagine us doing the census through the county councils and then have someone adding the numbers up at the end? It would not work. A centralised approach works. One would break it down into the electoral districts. The way the Revenue Commissioners probably works is that it does not check everybody’s VAT; it carries out random sampling or has another way of doing it. That will work. We know that the census has worked.