Dr. Jane Suiter:

Yes. That funding included local elections. There was not one in 2003, which there should have been as best practice would be to have it annually, but there was one in the four years of 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2007. There was a panel in the first year, which was kind of door to door, which is the best practice because that is where we will get the people who do not vote. People will answer their door, whereas if they are rung up and asked to do a survey on elections, those who are very disengaged from the political process will say "No". It is easier to do it door to door. A sample of those would have been kept, with people then surveyed by post afterwards, and fresh samples were then put in to make sure the numbers were kept up. That covered the local and European elections in that cycle.

I agree it is very important to cover the local and European elections because that is fundamental. There are many people living in this country now who are not eligible to vote in national elections, although they might be in time, but who are eligible to vote in the local elections, which have a different range of candidates and different issues. That is very important. We know when local and European elections are because they are fixed in time, so it is fairly straightforward. The referendums are more of a moveable feast, as is the general election.

It is important to do this each year. In our discussions with the Department of the Taoiseach, it was pointed out that the Central Statistics Office, CSO, does a lot of this kind of research. However, the CSO has very fixed times, so one could easily have a referendum or a national election and the CSO would not ask anyone any questions until three months later, when everybody has forgotten why they voted in a particular way or why they did not vote. Normally, when people are asked if they voted, 85% say "Yes", when we know 85% of people did not turn out. The ESRI did the questions in 2002 and it had access to the marked registers, so it was able to tell who did and did not vote, although it was completely anonymised before anybody like me saw it. This meant we knew who did and who did not, and we were able to look at different things rather than just relying on self-reporting. There are different ways of doing it.

In summary, the figure is something around the parameters of the 2002-07 budget and there has obviously been inflation in terms of how much polling companies charge to do these things.