Mr. Art O'Leary:

I will come to the Deputy's last question first, if I may. We are a small organisation. We have 37 people working in it. Our staff complement is 52 and, as more functions and responsibilities are assigned to us, we will slowly build up the staff, but we are happy with the level of resources we have. The point about being a small unit is that we cannot do everything directly.

Most of our real work is done in collaboration with others. Interestingly, in all the elections we have had in the past year, we have turned up in community halls, rooms and groups all over the country. People like to hear from us but the thing that makes a lasting and sustained impact is if they hear from people like themselves. As people with disabilities say, "nothing about us without us". With Travellers, immigrants and young people, I turn up in a shirt and tie and a nice suit and I am hilarious, and people think that is great fun, but to deliver real change, they need to hear from Travellers, young people, elderly people and so forth. That collaboration is hugely important for us. I suspect we will end up, as part of our public engagement in education programme, funding groups and organisations to deliver some of these education programmes. It will be the main plank of how we reach out to all these - we do not allow the words "hard to reach" - groups. These groups are not hard to reach. They get up every day, live their lives and go about their business. It is just that the distance between them and us is huge.

Our role is to be in communities and spaces where these groups hang out in order to deliver a message in a way they will understand. For young people in particular, these spaces are virtual so we need to be on TikTok and all over social media. I have two teenage daughters. My two youngest kids are teenagers and they live their entire lives through the lens of TikTok. If we are not there, we cannot reach that audience, so it is important.

On the Deputy's first question about the response to our post-electoral event reviews, we have made a number of recommendations, some of which were easy, quick wins and some of which will require legislative change and policy development. The biggest recommendation from the last post-electoral event review is that there is one group of people who have to pay to vote. That is people with a disability who need to get certification from their doctors to apply for a postal vote. The National Disability Authority and disability groups have told me that this is a big barrier, because €25 is a lot of money to people like that. We need that charge to be removed. We need it to be waived as soon as possible. The people in the franchise section of the Department of housing are working hard to try to do that. They absolutely accept the recommendation. Whether it will be done in time for the presidential election is an open question because there are issues around negotiation with doctors' groups and so forth and they never go quickly. However, it is accepted that it is the right thing to do and that it must be done.

Approximately 15,000 people vote by post, of whom just 3,500 are people with a disability. I wonder for how many the €25 for certification is a barrier. We will continue to press that as a matter of supreme urgency. We are working in other areas such as accessibility of polling stations. There are 6,500 polling stations, with 2,700 polling centres. There is a small number of inaccessible polling stations. We will not quibble about the official figures for how many are inaccessible. There are figures that we have discovered through observation. One inaccessible polling station is one too many. There should not be a place where people go to vote that is inaccessible. We have observed all kinds of workarounds, including back doors and other ways of getting people to vote, which are not acceptable.