Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 24 September 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government
Electoral Arrangements to Protect Democracy and Ballot Integrity: Discussion
3:00 pm
Mr. Art O'Leary:
Ultimately, on the question of who is responsible for the recommendations, one would be making scattergun recommendations as this is the responsibility of very different people. For example, with the electoral register it may be that we go to some chief executives and say that they need to give greater priority within their local authorities to the franchise section. I have told the story before that Mr. Carey and I attended a conference to speak to the franchise teams about the forthcoming elections. Some people got up to leave the conference midway through it. We asked where they were off to. They were off to interview lifeguards for summer jobs because the franchise sections tend to be based in the corporate services sections, a bucket into which everything is thrown that does not fit anywhere else. It is something that will likely come from our recommendations here.