Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Let us be very clear. I do not see any set of circumstances where we go back to the days where two or three political parties had the volume of people to do those independent verifications. I would love if that was possible but it is not. I think the point Mr. O’Leary is making is important. With that team of staff, so long as the staff know what they are looking for and are trained and briefed, you could do really important work. I have done election observation. When we go to a polling station we are going in looking for something particular and we get that the commission’s folks will be doing something different. I do not think the numbers are as problematic, although that is not the point I wanted to make.

Turning to research, this is not to tell the commission its job because the people here know it already, but we need an evidence base for the decisions we all have to make. I am really fed up with the poster debate. We all have a strong opinion but there is no evidence there. What will be very valuable is for the commission to evidence something. I share the Chair’s view. I use fewer posters than almost any other candidate in my constituency. It has never caused me a problem in Dublin Mid-West. I think regulations on numbers, locations and materials is the right way to go. I have listened very carefully to the political scientists, and not to politicians, on posters. When you talk to Professor Jane Suiter, Professor David Farrell and those people, they make the argument about participation. However, it would be really nice to have some independent evidence base to say whether any of us is correct or whether we are talking off the tops of our heads, and then to make recommendations and decisions on that basis. It is the same with the constituencies because, like the Chair, I think there are strong merits for the commission being allowed to make that decision and not to have the terms of reference constrained. For me, the kind of evidence is what difference does it make. If someone in a portion of Carlow, for example, becomes part of Tipperary, that has real consequences.

I am in a constituency, Dublin Mid-West, and the poor people of Saggart and Brittas are moved in every boundary review. Often they are in one area for local elections and another for general elections and what happens is they are forgotten. They get ignored because they are a small peripheral part, numbers-wise. Their experience will be that they are less well served. Fingal is less an issue because other than the name, which is a separate issue, the majority of people will probably not experience anything differently. The good people of Fingal might take exception to that but in the Carlow case, it is a really significant issue because of their level of representation, particularly in large geographical areas where candidates tend to be concentrated in the bigger population centres.

To emphasise the Chair’s point, I am thinking about the representativeness of the subsequent parliament. Obviously, I am in one of the three big parties. Electorally, we will benefit from the increase in the three-seaters, if all things remain equal, but we argued very strongly in tabled amendments, as did other parties, that we should not tie the commission’s hands and that it should have that choice. Because there is a strong argument to say the representativeness of a parliament can sometimes be diminished if there are too many lower-seat constituencies in terms of the plurality of opinions. Again, however, I would like to see some evidence of that. Is that actually the case? We can all have nice philosophical arguments in here. That research function will be really important because if it does not end those debates, it might at least give an evidence base for decisions. That is why I think that research function is so important. I am sure the commission paid attention to it. We had very long debates here about the long list of research functions we wanted to give the committee. We wanted to insert some of those things into the legislation. We will all make submissions. Some of the issues are more obvious priorities than others. I look forward to engaging with the committee further on that once the consultation is closed.