Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)
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I am very supportive of the establishment of an electoral commission. I take the point as to whether we should be seeking evolution or revolution. It is true that one may achieve revolution by doing things by degrees and producing a revolutionary change over time. That is possibly the way it will go in practical terms. An electoral commission will be an important part of political and institutional reform. We would all start with the electoral register because it is so much the obvious place to start. When domestic rates were in place, there was a direct relationship with voters, with calls being made to their doors on a regular basis. There was a rationale at that time for keeping the register up to date and it was known who was living in all the houses in a particular area. That relationship no longer exists and I doubt it will exist for any service in the future because so much is now done online.

Positioning it with the local authorities might not necessarily lead to the greatest of results. It is the obvious place to put it, particularly in the context of where people are located. Perhaps it might be possible to analyse what happens on a daily basis or in the context of the review of the electoral register. There are different practices in different places. For example, the county in which I live has a very high transient rate because Maynooth College is located there. This might not be the case in other places, which may have more stable populations. Different circumstances may obtain at various locations. I am of the view that a rolling register is absolutely the way to go.

People tend to miss cut-off dates. In that context, there could be a great deal more engagement in the context of allowing people to register online. I accept that there is a need to authenticate any information which is provided online but an auditing process could be put in place to facilitate that to which I refer. People now do a great deal more of their business online and I am of the view that real possibilities exist in this regard. I take the point to the effect that it is not necessarily about saving money but rather about doing things differently and achieving better outcomes.

If that which is proposed is going to represent an evolution and if it is going to be done in a sequential way, it would be useful to map out the range it should cover. There is a tendency to tick boxes and to state that something has been done when only 50% of the work has been completed and when there is a need to go significantly further. One of the absolute basic principles of any electoral commission is that it should be independent. Regardless of how it is done, putting in place a rolling register will very much depend on the mechanisms that will be available. Norway has been working on its system for the past 20 years and people there are able to do a great deal online. The collaborative approach taken in Norway has given rise to massive administrative savings. I suspect that we could work towards adopting such a model here. People in Ireland can already access Revenue's online service, which is very good. There are serious possibilities in terms of the online option.

An issue of concern is that which relates to the Standards in Public Office Commission and the fact that it does not always have the ability to carry out particular functions in the way it would like. We know, for example, that there are spending limits which apply at election time. I am aware of a number of people who have exceeded those limits - sometimes by quite a distance - at every election since they were introduced. We all exceed the limits and it is quite difficult for the powers that be to monitor what goes on at election time. There is no point in setting standards if people can bypass them without any real sanction being applied. It is necessary for audits to be carried out in order for behaviour such as that to which I refer to be detected. The people who are more likely to carry out such audits - or who have the ability to carry them out - are those who are busy during election campaigns. Perhaps audits should be performed during elections but people must have the wherewithal to carry them out in circumstances where valid complaints are made. It should not be down to, for example, an opposing candidate to make a complaint.

The limits to which I refer were put in place for a very good reason. They are generous and a great deal of money is wasted during election campaigns. As a result, there should not be a necessity for people to exceed them. If they are exceeded, then we must ask from where the money involved is coming, consider the question of influence, etc. These are the very matters with which the Minister is trying to deal.

I would like some thought put into that element and how the Minister would fund it. I may well make a submission on it.

In regard to electoral funding spending, the Leaders' allowance, now the parliamentary standard allowance for Independents has been included in the remit of the Standards in Public Office Commission, an issue on which I had argued on many occasions. All that funding should be properly scrutinised and the electoral funding should be part of it. For example, 17% of the current Dáil is made up of Independents. If there were no Independents, the electoral funding pot would be the same. However, it is not reduced by 17% by virtue of the fact that the Dáil is made up of 17% Independents. It may well be that money could be better used. When people talk about turnout at elections, part of that has to do with people seeing a relationship between voting and outcomes. There is a role for independent education, so to speak. It is fine in secondary school but when people actually get the vote it is of more value to them. I would like to see some funding made available to an independent body for the purpose of public engagement on the value of voting. I do not think I have ever come out of an election campaign where people have not asked if they have used their vote correctly. That is the kind of thing people say.

The single transferable vote is very easy to use but people tend to think it is more complicated because it is complicated to count. We all know this. Even in this there is a role for an independent body to have an ongoing programme of education in place. There are obvious issues such as the referenda and how to administer them. Sometimes there can be criticism of, say, the McKenna judgment where it is felt there is an imbalance in terms of the strength of public opinion. There may well be merit in looking at this. An independent commission would have a level of authority by virtue of the fact that it is independent. I definitely think we are all on the one page in regard to actual register about the roll programme. That is the obvious first step. It would be useful to agree on what other elements should be examined so that it is not something that is concluded and the view is that the work is done. There is much more to be done and it needs to quite ambitious. The point I am making is that it is for the next Government to pick up where this one leaves off.

There are some very serious academics on the stakeholder paper. We probably underuse some of the academics in developing policy. Every one of those is serious in his or her own right. I would hope we would continue to look at best practice in other countries to see whether we can evolve into a political system where people will come and look at us, rather than us going to look at them. That is possible but it has to be ambitious.