Ms Sharon Finegan:

As the Chairman mentioned in her opening remarks and subsequently, we hired a polling company, Red C Research & Marketing Limited, to select the members of the assembly. The company was to select a representative sample based on various demographics such as age, gender, socioeconomic background and geographical spread. There is a detailed methodology document on the assembly's website as to how the company went about it. The methodology used by Red C Research & Marketing Limited shows that rather than splitting the country into 26 counties, it stratified by region across 15 broad regions and the members were selected out of those regions. It is done by urban-rural split within the four major regions of Dublin, rest of Leinster, Munster and Connacht. Using this stratification it did a random sample within that. That is quite standard in polling when one is trying to get a nationally representative sample.

Ordinarily, what would happen from a polling perspective is one would have a group of 1,000 and that would then throw up more people across the 15 stratifications, so one might in those instances get to the 26. However, for the purposes of our assembly we used the well-worn, usually adopted methodology and it transpired that we had the representation in that way. It was representative of the other cohorts. When we had replacements, for example, we were careful to replace so that it continued to be representative. On our website the Deputy will see quotas as to the numbers we had to fill across each of those broad areas and in re-recruiting, we continued to ensure that each of those quotas was filled. It is quite a technical answer but we made enormous efforts to make sure it was as representative as possible. I hope that answers the Deputy's question.