Ms Petra Woods:

The timeline depends on the passage of the legislation. Local authorities have always been able to request any information that they need to prepare the register. This legislation will make it explicit that that can include a personal public service number, PPSN, a date of birth and an eircode. These are three critical pieces of data that will help to manage duplication on the register. That will allow local authorities to actively gather this data and clean up their registers on the basis of the data received. We are working with local authorities to progress the move to a central set-up. All the provisions relating to the register will be subject to commencement orders. We will try to work with local authorities to make sure that they are ready to implement the new legislation once it is passed. We are already working on them to make sure that they have, for example, the data collection tools. They all have systems that they use to run their registers and to develop the registers and we are working with them to make sure that those are ready in the first instance. We are also looking at the options of moving to a more centralised solution. We are discussing with Dublin City Council and the local government sector how something like voter.ie, which has been successfully piloted in Dublin, could be rolled out nationally. That could then lead the way to that centralised system. There was a question earlier about how that transition would be managed. That would then be much more standard migration process of data from one system to another. We would hope it would be fairly seamless. While the general scheme does not go to that level of detail, suffice it to say that we need the legislative provisions to gather the data and to set up the structures within which the new registration process will work. We already work with local authorities to make sure we can get that off the ground as quickly as possible after the legislation has passed.