Mr. Art O'Leary:

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Seanadóir. I also thank him for his kind words about our work. We have a brilliant team at An Coimisiún Toghcháin. There is a large range of very diverse skills but the one thing that every single person in the building has is fire in their belly and passion about democracy. We jump out of bed in the morning saying that we can make a real difference to people's lives here so let us go and make that difference. That is the culture of the organisation, which was possible because we are new. We did not take over from somebody and say that we must do a culture change in all of these things. We are building an organisation that can sustain for 100 years and which can make a real difference to people's lives. Senator Clonan spoke about the "low-hanging fruit". The last year and a half has been a period like no other. Every single electoral event that is possible to have is happening in this period. Not only is it an opportunity for us to really jump in and be everywhere, as was indicated, it is also a glorious opportunity to learn. As an organisation we learn by doing. We are two years old and like every two-year-old sometimes we are crawling around on the floor trying to absorb as much information as we can. We need to use this information and build on it to make a real difference, based on evidence that we have discovered.

This comes into the Senator's point about research. Research is the future of everything. We will make recommendations, based on evidence, for electoral reform to encourage people to play a larger part in electoral events. We hope that the Government and the Oireachtas would be persuaded by that evidence because it will be an expert view, having considered issues from all perspectives. As I mentioned to Deputy Toole, we have sufficient funding right now for what it is that we need to do. Our research programme, which members may have seen, is ambitious and covers a huge amount. It is the same with education and research where we focus on groups experiencing barriers.

The voter turnout question is always interesting. On the turnout for postal voters, there are 15,000 postal voters and turnout is 62%, which is not dissimilar to the turnout across the rest of the country. We do not know how many of those who turn out are disabled people because votes are private. We do know that some 3,500 of those 15,000 are disabled. In the local and European Parliament elections we focused on disability in particular so we know that 22% of people who voted claimed to have had a disability, which aligns perfectly with the CSO results as well. Some were sceptical about that figure because people assume that those with glasses must have said they had a disability too. There are, however, many forms of disability as well, some visible and some not so visible. All we know is that there is a group of people with a disability who experience barriers to voting, whether these are physical, informational or attitudinal. Something that is coming back very strongly is that a number of people did not go out to vote the last time because they did not know who to vote for. We need to do much more in that regard. Now with technology a person should be able to come onto our website and click on the constituency so that his or her ballot paper should pop up a week before an electoral event, which will give the person an opportunity. Things like the use of technology will give us a real opportunity to try to improve that turnout figure.