Dr. Muiris MacCárthaigh:

The issue of redundancies is very real and there are huge hidden costs which people do not think about when trying to merge organisations and suddenly they discover there are not enough, or are too many, people and different IT systems. These are practical issues and real concerns. The media will talk about another quango and another €50 million. If we are going to set up an electoral commission, we must ask about the transitional arrangements and where people's jobs are going to go.

The issue of different social groups is vital to the whole discussion about what the design of the electoral commission will be. Will it be a small group of the great and the good, the Clerk of the Dáil, the Clerk of the Seanad and a judge of some sort? I would point to the success of the Road Safety Authority, which seems to have cracked this problem by setting up a stakeholder board. This was not in the legislation but it brought in people from various groups and listened to them on a quarterly basis in the early days of the authority's existence in order to determine the issues. The Road Safety Authority board was concerned with governance and was not a stakeholder but the advisory stakeholder board is an idea that might address the questions raised by Deputy Coppinger.