Mr. Art O'Leary:

That is the plan. As Ms Woods mentioned, this is one of our key roles because we have always taken the view that the electoral register is the foundation block for everything. The two keywords here are "completeness" and "accuracy". This means that everybody entitled to be on the register should be on the register and all the details we have about people should be correct too. Mr. Carey and his team have had many engagements with the registration authorities in the last year. I think they visited ten of the local authorities, the registration authorities, in person.

We have also had two levels of a paper-based engagement as well, so we are starting to see data. We are starting to see figures around the number of people on the register compared with the populations in those areas, which vary from 73% to 108%. It is clear the priority the work of franchise sections in local authority sections is given is very different and it is clear to all of us that more needs to be done. Members will see from the data when it emerges towards the end of the year that we will be having conversations with chief executives of local authorities in areas where there is clearly more work to be done.

With some of the new people who are turning up on the register, we are starting to get PPS numbers, dates of birth and eircodes. These are unique identifiers that will help us in the years ahead. There is, however, a great swathe of people who are on the register and perhaps duplicated all over the country. We speak about the register as if it is a single entity, but there are 31 different registers and they do not talk to each other, except perhaps in Dublin. Ms Woods's oversight of the modernisation programme will deal with that by creating a single database that will give us the opportunity to spot duplicates, such as people who moved house, were born somewhere and went to college somewhere else, etc. While I will not say the electoral register is going to be bulletproof, in the next couple of years it will be significantly enhanced. When that happens we will be able to measure things properly, including turnout at elections. The turnout figures are unreliable at best at the moment.