Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 3:

In page 3, after line 30, to insert the following:

“Research on revision of Dáil constituencies

5.In relation to the revision of Dáil constituencies, An Coimisiún Toghcháin shall within 24 months of the passing of this Act, conduct research and make such recommendations as it considers appropriate to Dáil Éireann on— (a) the abolition of constituencies returning three members, and

(b) the specification for an indeterminate period of the number of members of which Dáil Éireann is to be composed and of the constituencies to be represented by the members, while varying from time to time the number of members to be elected for each such constituency having regard to changes in the distribution of the population throughout the State.”.

The need for my amendment is illustrated by the previous conversation. For the record, I was not happy with the name change from Dublin South-East to Dublin Bay South nor were a lot of the constituents who I represent now.

In seriousness, the purpose of my amendment calls on the coimisiún to conduct research and make such recommendations on two specific issues. The first is the precise point about the chopping and changing of names. The second is the different names and different boundaries of constituencies over the years. My amendment wants us to move away from that for the future and move us to a new system, as outlined by Professor Michael Gallagher of Trinity College Dublin in his excellent article published in The Irish Timespublished on 6 September. In response to the commission's report he wrote that a preferable approach, in his view and I think he is right, would be to have fixed boundaries. As one can see from looking at the Schedule, the constituency of Laois is the county of Laois, and the constituency of Kerry is the county of Kerry. So there is no difficulty for the people living in those constituencies and they are represented by public representatives who represent the county. So a fixed boundary, with the number of members to be elected for each constituency to be changed from time to time to align with changes in the democratic distribution of population, would make far more sense from a democratic perspective. I will not labour the point but Professor Gallagher spoke very persuasively and eloquently about the more democratic effect of having fixed boundaries, ideally along county lines, and one would then do away with this issue of changing names and shifting individual communities in and out of particular constituencies. It makes sense and we call on the coimisiún to undertake research and report on this.

My amendment refers to a second issue, which again is inspired by Professor Gallagher's article, and asked that we look at the abolition of constituencies which return only three Members. There was a very strong argument for moving to larger numbers per constituency, again it was made in Michael Gallagher's article, that this more accurately reflects people's preferences in a PR-STV system. I set this out in more detail in my speech on Second Stage. Again, I will not labour the point but I know that the Minister will respond by saying that of course the commission can undertake this research. Obviously we will submit to the commission that it would research this. We do think this is an important enough issue of future-proofing related both to how one determines constituency boundaries and the number of representatives per constituency. We think that is important enough to place within the legislation.