Mr. Art O'Leary:

Training is provided to all polling staff. There are occasional difficulties. There was no electoral event between 2020 and 2024 and when returning officers went out to gather together the polling staff for all of last year's electoral events, they discovered that in some cases up to half of the polling staff were not available. They had got too old, etc., and some of the demands, including being there from 6 a.m. to 10.30 p.m., are just too much for some people. For staff who were engaged at very short notice, this was a difficulty in the early parts of last year. However, we are confident that sufficient training is in place. Within An Coimisiún Toghcháin, all of our staff and commission members did disability awareness training once last year, and the people in the team Ms Delaney leads have done a deep dive into disability awareness training. They have done professional-level training to ensure that when we do the observation and we set the standards for all the polling stations we visit - we visited 300 polling stations last year during the course of these elections - we know exactly what we are looking for, both from a disability and accessibility perspective and from a support perspective for people who are there. There is much more we can do, but we look forward to making big inroads in this between now and 2029, which is the next scheduled electoral event after the presidential election.