Mr. Joseph Burke:

I will deal with the first part. The Deputy quite rightly distinguished between the people who work on the day of the poll and those in the count centres.

The majority of the people who work at the count are very interested in the counting process and really enjoy it. While I would not say that the pay is irrelevant, it is not the driving force for the majority of them and certainly not for the top table people. We are very lucky that a lot of the people who work for us in the count centre are employees of local authorities. They are involved in the count when the local election count takes place and then are available to me for the election events I am responsible for. We supplement that then with new people. It certainly is not as much of a challenge to have people for the count. We do not have the same difficulties as we might have for polling day. The volume is obviously much smaller. It is 500 people for a count and it is 1,200 people for a polling day. Some people do both. The greater pressure is to have enough people on polling day. I do not want anybody to get the impression that there is any risk or any chance that we are not going to have enough people to do these jobs. We have had two election events this year and we filled all the spaces. I am just highlighting that it is getting more challenging. That is as far as I am going with it. I am not suggesting to anybody that we will not be able to do what we have to do. We have always managed to do it and I am confident we can still do that. The timing of the local elections and European Union elections in June caused particular pressure points. We have some students who work for us, and it is great to get students and young people involved in the process because then hopefully we would have them for the future, but a lot of them were doing exams and some of them maybe were going away for the summer so they were not available in June. It caused an extra pressure in filling the positions but that is just a seasonal thing. While I indicate this as a challenge, it is not something I am concerned about.