Mr. Art O'Leary:

Every registration authority will have a return. They have made a return to us giving details of the work that they have done, the accuracy and the completeness. We have matched that with some of the CSO data as well. That detail will be in our report at the end of the year so it will be very obvious what is working well and what is not. There might be very different reasons as to why it is not working well but we hope to bring transparency to the register, which is hugely important.

On the research issue and the national election study, we have the finest political scientists in the country on our management board who helped us with the design of the questionnaire. Members will have seen some of the detail of this study as well. Historically we know so little about voters in this country and we know nothing about would be, could be, and should be voters. This national election and democracy study, NEDS, is an opportunity for us to really get under the bonnet here and start to understand why people do not vote and what motivates people to get out there as well, which will help us also. We have a research advisory group on the wider research programme that is made-up of lawyers and academics and people with disabilities, Travellers and so on, to really allow us to target some of the research on some of these under-represented and under-reached groups.

We need some help and I am very happy that we have some of the best people in the country working with us on that. The Deputy asked me about some details of the action we have taken on issues like turnout. Some of the big-picture stuff is very easy to determine. We have our Check the Register campaign, which we ran for six months, and the Department did something similar with the local authorities. Some 250,000 extra people joined the register in those six months so it is clear that that worked. We also ran a separate campaign on spoiled votes that greatly reduced - by 30% - the number of spoiled votes. It is complicated with two ballot papers, etc. We are happy with the work we do which we are using as pilot programmes also and will continue to do that.

We tend to separate each campaign into three different parts. The first part is to check the register and to get people on the register quickly. With a general election, as Mr. Burke mentioned earlier on, there is not much time. We will need to be active very quickly in that space to get people on the register and then to explain how to vote. One thing we have discovered is that nobody ever sits down to explain how it is that one votes. We, the staff and commission members, hung around for an unhealthy amount of time in count centres all over March and June to understand the kind of mistakes people are making on ballot papers so that we can design our programmes to correct these mistakes as well. The fruits of that work will be seen in the coming general election campaign where we will be dealing with people and explaining how it is that they should vote properly. The final element of the campaign is activation. In the last three, four to five days of the campaign, we will be encouraging people to start making plans to vote. When will they vote, how will they get there, etc.? That has also been a hugely successful part of what we have done.

With the referendum in March, the turnout was something around 45% but some of the campaigns, analysts and commentators on this were expecting some of the lowest turnout of all time. It was about mid-range for a stand-alone referendum. We are reasonably happy with that but our long-term ambition here is for everybody who is entitled to be on the register and they should be getting out to vote as well.

One interesting set of statistics which also came from our National Election and Democracy Study, NEDS, related to when people turn to making up their minds as to who to vote for. While it may be something to do with the size of the ballot paper, 28% of people made up their minds in the last 24 hours as to who they are going to vote for in the European Parliament elections. That matters and we made a recommendation for the removal of the broadcast moratorium because we need as much information as possible available for people during that last 24 hours, which is important.