Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

The PR-STV system has never claimed to achieve perfectly proportional results. Several proportional representation systems are more proportional, others much less so. For PR-STV to be perfectly proportional, the State would need to form a single constituency. Everybody recognises that this is not a practical suggestion. Constituency size in Ireland has been restricted to three, four and five seats since 1947. It would be too rigid to restrict the commission to one or two constituency sizes. We need some choice of constituency sizes to produce electoral areas that make sense to the people, such as, for example, enclosing entire communities or adhering to previous physical features. It is better to leave it to the commission to decide on the numbers of the different seat constituencies and where they should be located.

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