Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

The Deputy is quite correct. It is an interesting point which needs to be teased out with the commission. On the point the commission raised about the error which it said occurred in the machine, the only one of which I was aware was the one about which the Department informed the commission which was an infinitesimal difference on a decimal point. The commission was informed that had been corrected. As I understand it, it had no bearing in any real sense on the distribution of votes. We must keep matters in perspective when considering exactly what has been said. That is important to record. Equally, it is fine by me if the commission rightly says it would have preferred if all testing had finished a month ago. The commission is of the opinion that we should not be testing this close to the elections, which is a criticism I accept. I accept also that the commission's view differs from that of the Department that one should continue to test. I will not argue a reasonable point which is fairly made. However, the commission's net point is that it wants time to perform testing of the kind which has already been carried out. The most significant end-to-end testing of the entire system was carried out in real time in a real live scenario by its use in a number of constituencies in the previous general election. It was used in a further number of constituencies during a referendum.

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