Mr. Barry Ryan:

As the Minister of State said, it is the intention that the commission would have its own Vote. It would compete for resources in the budget in the normal way with other organisations. To answer the question directly, it is not funded from the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. It will have a stand-alone Vote.

I thank the Chair for the technical suggestion about the "shalls" and the "mays". We will take that on board when drafting the Bill.

On constituency reviews, we needed to come up with a slightly different mechanism to trigger the constituency review. The existing legislation requires that the Minister would establish the constituency commission following the publication of preliminary census results by the CSO. We have a commission continuously in place now so there is no need for that ministerial order. The general scheme provides that the publication of those preliminary results triggers the constituency review work of the electoral commission. The same would be envisaged for LEAs.

Currently, LEAs tend to follow on from constituency reviews based on the census results. The intention is that an LEA review would follow on from a review of Dáil and European constituency boundaries.