Mr. Art O'Leary:

It makes a difference, and not just at organisational level or in respect of representative groups. We are aware that having family and friends vote is the best way to encourage people to vote. We were delighted to work with the Irish Wheelchair Association in Belmullet because it does brilliant work. We were able to follow the lived experience. We turned up at hundreds of polling stations at various electoral events in the last year and chanced upon people with disabilities. It was a brilliant opportunity to follow their progress from leaving their houses to voting and getting home, and to examine issues including those relating to transportation. This is the way forward for us. We should be doing it with more groups, including homeless people, immigrants and Travellers. We should be doing all this to find out people’s lived experience. Even after a year of doing post-electoral event reviews, they are becoming much more sophisticated and laser-like in focusing on actual barriers that people experience.

After Covid, when we do all sorts of things by tapping a card, including paying for coffee, I thought that Irish people would be much more confident about using technology to vote. It appears not. At some point, we will have to have a national conversation about the use of technology. We have a very paper-based electoral process. You vote manually and the votes are counted manually. It is very transparent and Irish people love it, but the downside is that it can be confusing to some. It is perhaps a little harder. We are still dealing with spoiled votes. The members will have been at count centres and must have been shocked by some of the spoiled votes they saw. We have been in dozens of count centres-----