Pádraic McCormack (Galway West, Fine Gael)

The purpose of this Bill is to implement the recommendations of the Constituency Commission Report 2003 on changes to European Parliament constituencies and to give effect to the Council decisions of 25 June and 23 December 2002 concerning the election of Members to the European Parliament. I regret that after the redrawing of the constituencies Ireland will lose two seats. We are holding our number of seats compared to other European countries but despite our increasing population we are still losing two seats. I accept the independence of the commission which had the job of redrawing the constituencies and coming up with a conclusion.

Neither I nor the people of Clare regret that Clare has to join its neighbours in Connacht-Ulster. It is unusual that there are three provinces represented in the north-west constituency. It might have been more fitting if the constituency was called Connacht-Ulster-Clare or by some name which would recognise the addition of Clare to the constituency.

Some of our selection conventions have gone ahead already despite the fact that the new constituencies will not be officially recognised until this legislation is passed, possibly this week if Committee Stage is completed tomorrow. Fine Gael held a selection convention in Sligo on Sunday. We welcome Clare into the new north-west constituency and have a very good candidate from the county, former Senator Madeleine Taylor-Quinn, who was selected with Senator Jim Higgins. They are a good combination both geographically and gender wise to retain two seats for the party in Connacht-Ulster.

Our outgoing MEP, Joe McCartin, who is the longest serving MEP in the country and one of the longest serving in Europe, will retire after 25 years service. I compliment him on his service to the Connacht-Ulster constituency over the past 25 years. Somebody described him on Sunday as a statesman. I looked up the word in the dictionary to find out the difference between a statesman and a politician. I found that a politician worries about the next election but a statesman worries about the next generation. Joe McCartin as an MEP and formerly a Member of this House and the Seanad is a statesman and a true European who represents the European ideal. His representation in Europe on behalf of this country will be sadly missed. I wish him every success in his retirement and also wish success to his possible successors, Senator Jim Higgins and councillor Madeleine Taylor-Quinn.

County Clare is west of the Shannon so perhaps it was natural in the redrawing of the constituencies to include it with Connacht-Ulster. Perhaps the independent commission, which had no option but to reduce the number of seats to 13, looked at the issue geographically. Clare is now included with Connacht-Ulster and I am sure there will be co-operation between candidates and people in the area to send the best three MEPs to Europe to represent the area for the next five years.

This Bill also deals with the termination of the dual mandate for a person who is a Member of the Houses of the Oireachtas and the European Parliament. A once-off derogation will apply until the next general election to a Member of the Houses of the Oireachtas who is elected to the European Parliament in June 2004. That is a bit too generous. When this legislation was discussed in committee, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government said that the same regulations would apply to abolishing the dual mandate here as to the dual mandate between local authority members and Oireachtas Members. Perhaps the dual mandate of local authority and Oireachtas Members may not be abolished because Deputy Ring is involved in a High Court challenge to it and judgment has not yet been given in the matter. We may all have the opportunity to decide what to do when the result of that challenge is known.

At present there is a clear difference between the regulations for both dual mandates. The legislation introduced in the Dáil to abolish the local authority and Oireachtas dual mandate applies from the next election. It applies so strictly that a Member of the Oireachtas is not eligible to stand for a local authority. However, a Member of the Oireachtas is entitled to stand for the European elections next June. Not only that, the Member can serve a further three years as a dual Member of the Oireachtas and the European Parliament.

There is clear and absolute discrimination against the local authority member in terms of the provision in the legislation being introduced to deal with a dual mandate from the European point of view. The Minister has not lived up to his promise or to his absolute assurance to the committee that there would be no difference between abolishing the dual mandate for European Parliament members and local council members.

The European election will be the first election in which we have full electronic voting. All Opposition Members who have spoken here tonight have expressed serious reservations about the electronic voting system and its introduction for that election. I do not have the technical qualifications and do not know enough about the system to say whether it can be fixed.

I am a member of the Joint Committee on the Environment and Local Government, as is Deputy Allen. The committee invited independent IT experts to meet the experts from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. We wished to facilitate an open and frank discussion of the reservations the independent experts had expressed about the Department officials' confidence in electronic voting. The meeting went well early in the day and there was a frank exchange of views. As Deputy Allen outlined, 40 questions were posed by the IT experts from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, to the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government inspectors. Before lunch, committee members agreed to adjourn the meeting and continue the discussion later that week or early the following one to provide time in which answers could be made to the 40 questions. Once the answers were provided, every member of the committee could have securely supported the idea of electronic voting and provided confidence to the people.

After lunch the committee reconvened but something had happened. I presume the Fianna Fáil and Progressive Democrats members of the committee had received instructions from the Minister. The Fianna Fáil members proposed that the committee proceed immediately to adopt electronic voting without waiting for answers to the 40 questions. That set a bell ringing in my mind. The Minister seemed to be in an undue rush to proceed with the €40 million contract to introduce electronic voting. Given that the Progressive Democrats are supposed to be the Government's watchdogs, I was surprised to see the party's representative from my constituency, Deputy Grealish, voting with the Government. I was more surprised that the Independent, Deputy Healy-Rae, who had vigorously said he would not trust any electronic voting machine, sent Deputy Fox to substitute for him and vote with the Government. I thought it was an amazing performance. While I have great respect for both Deputies, they were well tied to the Minister's passionate desire to introduce electronic voting. That raised suspicions in my mind.

The Minister would have done better to bring the committee with him. Every member was ready to be convinced that electronic voting was the future. I acknowledge that mistakes can be made with manual voting through the failure to stamp ballot papers. According to the IT experts who attended the committee, mistakes can also be made through the electronic voting system and it may be open to manipulation.

The debate on electronic voting has now moved into the public arena but as committee members, Deputy Allen, Deputy Gilmore and I cannot sell it because we did not adopt it. We are not obliged to defend the electronic voting system around the country. The matter is arising at meetings throughout my constituency and, I am sure, in every other one. People ask for details of electronic voting after reading in the newspaper that the system might not be dependable. They want to know if they can have full confidence in it. I advocate that the Minister should wait and delay implementation of any contracts he has signed to supply the electronic voting system. There is nothing more important than for people to have confidence in the electoral system. If that is lacking, one might as well forget democracy. All the committee sought was a paper trail to which tallymen could revert in the event of a close contest. It could be maintained in a separate ballot box which could be examined if there was a difficulty. It was a simple thing for which to ask, but we did not get it.

The members of the Joint Committee on the Environment and Local Government were not trying to show up the Minister. We were genuinely attempting to remove any doubts we had about the electronic voting system. The former Minister of State and Deputy from my own constituency, Mr. Bobby Molloy, assured the House that electronic voting would not be introduced unless it had all-party agreement. We and the general public depended on that. When they see the system being foisted on them without all-party agreement, members of the public are bound to ask questions. There is a particular problem for older people who are not familiar with IT systems. I put myself in that category. It is difficult for such people to have absolute confidence in electronic voting when they read in the newspapers that the Comptroller and Auditor General is expressing serious doubts on the matter. I am not going by what was said at the Committee of Public Accounts, but by what I read and the general public will have seen in the newspapers.

The IT experts who attended the Joint Committee on the Environment and Local Government expressed serious doubts but I do not know if they ever received answers to the 40 questions they posed. The committee did not get them. We were simply cut off by the force of numbers because, naturally, the Government has a majority. Hardly anybody knows the committee was in session. The general public do not know and the political reporters certainly do not know. It is a cloak and dagger system. While the proceedings are recorded and the minutes are available to be read, a committee's work does not receive the publicity a Bill receives as it goes through the Dáil. Electronic voting slipped through and it is only now that the real doubts and fears people have are coming to the fore. Worse still, the Minister will launch in the Mansion House the campaign to publicise electronic voting. A contract has been signed with a public relations company which will now spend €5 million of taxpayers' money to promote electronic voting around the country. I do not know if the company will be teaching people about the system or simply promoting the idea. I will probably learn the details tomorrow. As Deputy Allen said, the press will ask tomorrow how we have rushed headlong into an electronic voting system in the absence of all-party agreement in the Dáil. We would all be there tomorrow saying we support the system and believe it is an advance on the manual voting system, that it can be more accurate, and that the result can be known earlier. However, unfortunately, we cannot do that now because of the undue haste with which this was rushed through the Joint Committee on the Environment and Local Government without waiting for the correct and necessary assurances to be given to its members or the general public that everything was above board and that the 40 questions posed by IT experts from Maynooth could be satisfactorily answered by officials from the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. That way everyone would be singing from the same hymn sheet about the merits and validity of the electronic voting system.

I am sorry to say that, whatever reservations I may have had when this was going through Committee Stage under the auspices of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, I have greater reservations now, since the public debate is really only starting. How can professional IT experts be wrong when they express such reservations? Those before the committee that day told us, for example, that a machine could be programmed in advance so that every 50 or 100 votes any party received could be left off the voting. It is, therefore, open to manipulation or to the fear that people will not be absolutely confident in it. That is bad for us and for democracy.

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