Mr. Art O'Leary:

I will deal with the easy one first. We at An Coimisiún Toghcháin do not expect people to trust us because we turn up brand new on the landscape and say we are independent and impartial and that they should believe us because we are a trusted organisation. We will only demonstrate our independence and impartiality over time. People will either come to trust and believe us or they will not. People who do not trust or believe us just remain a group of individuals that we have to convince, because we are genuinely independent in the conduct of our business. We are doing our best in that regard. People make mistakes all the time. I am trying to create an organisation whereby if we make a mistake, we own it straight away. We will own up to it immediately, learn from it and never make it again. The Chairman is absolutely right that there are many people in Ireland with certain a world view who like to get their information from a particular source. To them, whatever the organisation is, that is their trusted source of information. It is the place they trust to get information from and we are just hoping that with the passage of time, it will come to be true that we can be trusted, but it is not an easy job.

I agree with the Chairman entirely on access to voting. If we step it back a little, the question is not how there are inaccessible polling stations in this day and age, given that most of them are schools, but how we have inaccessible schools. We vote one day every five years, but schoolchildren still have to get to schools as well. It is something we have spoken to returning officers about and which is going to be a really big focus. In our first event on 8 March we have targeted 100 polling stations for our members and staff to visit, all of which were listed as inaccessible in the previous general election. There is a difficulty here. It is not an excuse, just something the returning officers say. They can close these polling stations and use somewhere else, but consider rural areas where there are small numbers of people voting, such as, for example, 200 in a general election. If there are a small number of people with a disability who want to vote on the day, then in order to facilitate these people in a proper accessible station it must be moved 10 km to 12 km away, thereby inconveniencing the other 198 and 199 people who must now travel in a way they did not have to on previous polling days. That is a reason, not an excuse, for this, but it is something we are really focusing on. In fairness to returning officers and the Department of housing, years ago the number of polling centres that were inaccessible was over 100. In 2020, it was 23. The number is decreasing dramatically, but we will not be happy until it is zero.