Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses from the various political parties here. To get back to some sort of context, we are here to carry out pre-legislative scrutiny on the electoral reform Bill. I have two simple questions in this first round. I will speak in the second round if my colleague is not present. I made contact yesterday in the Oireachtas on the marked registers. We are in a bubble in here and we all know what is going on but the public who are listening in – I have no doubt there will be many – need to understand what is a marked register. A marked register is one that is marked off at the polling station, which indicates that someone has presented himself or herself to a polling station and received a ballot paper. It is nothing more than that. The person may or may not have voted. Of course, 99% of them vote. That is what it is. The returning officers for each constituency is mandated to submit the marked register to the Clerk of the Dáil. I contacted the people dealing with this yesterday. The marked registers are then kept here. The Clerk is specifically given guidelines to the effect that he must destroy those registers within six months. He must get a certificate confirming that they are both manually destroyed and that they are removed from our IT systems. I checked all of this yesterday. I also got the statutory declaration documentation on this process, which I thought was particularly interesting, setting out that the declaration that must be signed. In addition, I got a schedule of the fees that are paid. Let us be clear for the public listening in: political parties and politicians, and for that matter, I learned yesterday that it is open to the public, can apply to the Clerk of Dáil Éireann to have the marked registers, every register in the country, if they so wish. My question to each of the parties is whether they can confirm that they applied to the Clerk of Dáil Éireann for the marked registers. Can they confirm where they store them or upload them? Can they confirm if they divided up those registers among the constituencies? How did they distribute them? There are very strict criteria in the declaration. I have a copy of it and I will circulate it to the committee later setting out the legal requirements on how all that is done. That is one question.

It is really important that the public know what happens. I think the public will be appalled and shocked that, first, the marked registers are kept, second, that a fee is paid for them, and third, that they are transferred to all the political party groupings. Would everyone confirm that to me in a moment? That is a question for each and every witness here today.

Could the witnesses please explain the manner in which their party uses targeted advertising, deliberately showing political advertisements to people on the basis of their gender, age and location? I put that question to everyone. I will start at the top with Fianna Fáil and Mr. McShea, and work down through Fine Gael, the Green Party, Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats.