Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

On the Deputy's final question, less than half the amount remains with €1 million of the total budget being set aside for use in encouraging people to vote. The Government will proceed with that aspect. I welcome Deputy Allen's support in that regard. We should try, if nothing else, to get people out to vote.

Many of the issues contained in the report need to be carefully studied. I do not wish at this point, in the context of this debate, to go any further than I have. That may be for others to do. The commission raised two clear issues. It needs more time to repeat testing undertaken by international bodies. That is fair enough. It that is what it wishes to do, that is fine with me. It will be given the time to do the tests. It also states it has not had enough time to do the tests and the Government is willing to give it more time.

The commission's criticism of the system almost exclusively concerns the counting software. It questions how it is broken into. I do not wish to be flippant but my understanding is that the concerns raised relate to the extreme circumstance of an unknown person walking into a count centre filled with candidates, party colleagues, returning officers and presiding officers, walk through all those people, take over a computer in full view of everybody, hack into the system with the approval of everyone standing by and, having achieved that magnificent feat, sunder the election results. I ask people for balance in this debate. The chance of that sort of scenario happening is, in my view, is of incredulous proportions.

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