Dr. Adrian Kavanagh:

The commission must be answerable to the Oireachtas and there should be all-party agreement on this. As I tried to say in my initial submission, ideally there should be an identifiable head of the commission, an ombudsman or electoral czar. This is for various reasons, the main one being it is important to have an identifiable person who can speak on behalf of the commission to try to get across what it is doing. It should not be someone who is or has been involved in politics, nor should the person be from the administrative sector. It should be someone outside the political administrative sector who has a very good understanding of how elections operate. I am sure Mr. Donnelly has ideas about this.