Dr. Adrian Kavanagh:

I will make a few brief points. In response to the points made by Deputy Dowds and Senator Landy on political input, the point I was trying to make in my initial submission was on the idea of having a political advisory committee. I agree that politicians, party workers and people working in political organisations know a great deal about politics. They know about aspects of politics that academics do not have a clue about, so expertise is needed. The suggestion I tried to make in my submission is that the best way to do that would be to have an advisory committee made up of former politicians, current TDs, Senators, councillors, members of party headquarters and party workers. It would have to be a good mix representing all parties, groupings and alliances that was balanced in terms of gender, age and area. That would be my argument.

On the register, my sense is that the PPS number is the best way to go about it. Looking at what they do in the United Kingdom, there is scope to use online registration, not just to register people but to facilitate people who are moving house. It may need to be centralised. Eircodes could help the process even more because now one can type in one's name, PPS number and Eircode and that will show the holding district and the county one should be in, but we still need the locally based councillor. As Deputy Mulherin and others stated, we need to prevent people from being accidentally removed from the register. That can happen where people get into a moral panic about the registers being in a mess and the need for them to be cleaned up. As we have seen in the past, many people, usually older people, can be taken off the register because they did not complete forms or they were unable to check their registration online.

Deputy Coppinger made a good point about not having a committee made up of male judges or male academics. I would argue that some female academics would be excellent members of a commission. Dr. Theresa Reidy has spoken here, and there are a few others. We have to move away from the idea that every commission has to have a High Court judge or other such person. We do need expertise, but other voices are necessary also.

The idea of removing people from the register if they do not vote in two elections is bad politics. The danger is that after a while there might not be many people left on the register. Who should be removed? It might be younger voters or, in the case of a low turnout, people from disadvantaged areas. I do not like that idea.

I understand the point about compulsory voting. My argument is that we should only consider compulsory voting when the electoral system has been cleaned up. Otherwise, we have no right to talk about compulsory voting. If we had compulsory voting, people would have to have the right to choose "none of the above" when it comes to voting.