Mr. Art O'Leary:

I suspect this will crystallise when we start to highlight duplicates in the electoral register. People will be confronted with the choice on where they are ordinarily resident and where they would like to vote. I think it is an area that we will revisit in 2025 when we start to look at removing people from the register.

Deputy Howlin is absolutely right. I think there is nothing worse. I remember the Newstalk political correspondent, Páraic Gallagher, who in the 2016 election said he was going to vote and then he would have to go to work and to visit other polling stations, only to discover that he had been removed from the electoral register. It does happen sometimes.

There is an instruction to local authorities that there must be three visible attempts to contact people, and they must have refused to answer three written requests telling them that they have been unable to confirm they are living there. However, it does happen occasionally. This will feature as part of our review of the electoral register project. Again, it is something Mr. Carey and his team will be looking at as well.

There was a dependance in the olden days, if I can call them that, in old God's time, on fieldworkers. Local authorities had fieldworkers who spent their time going around communities, knocking on doors and asking people if they could confirm who was in the house. With the rise of apartment blocks and gated communities, local authorities do not use fieldworkers for this any more. They spend time doing desk-based research, checking rip.ie and all of these things as well. They confirm addresses using social welfare and all of that kind of stuff too. This is something that will get into the real nitty-gritty of it because it is the fundamental foundation stone of everything. The electoral register has to be right. Everybody who is entitled to vote should be on the register. We should encourage people to be on the register, and if they are on the register, we need to make sure they stay there if that is their entitlement. It is big for us.

Spoiled votes are, again, another brilliant learning opportunity for us and an educational opportunity because people have many learning styles. The older generation perhaps like to read about how to do these things - "This is what your ballot paper looks like. You put 1, 2 and 3." The younger generation might like to see a cartoon or some kind of animation. We have the facilities now to do all this stuff in-house. Everybody will have at their disposal, at the click of a button or the opening of their local newspaper, a way to discover how to vote.

I have mentioned Limerick a couple of times. This is the first time in this country that we will have a directly elected mayor. I think we should use it as an opportunity to really push the boat out. Let us go and have some fun in Limerick. I am not sure whether those words were ever said at an Oireachtas committee before, but we intend to spend some time in Limerick on all the local media, on local radio, and meeting people to encourage them to get out and vote, just to test some of the machinery and to see what works and what encourages people to get out. It is something on which we can be held to account.