Barry Andrews (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill. I was canvassing recently in a housing estate with my electoral register in hand. I assure constituency colleagues in the House that it is not my normal practice to have the electoral register in hand. I just happened to be very diligent on this particular day and I noticed when I came to No. 5, that ten people were registered at that house. I rang the door bell in great excitement and was greatly disappointed to find that a mere three people in the house should legitimately have been on the register. The anecdotes have been plentiful in this debate in recent days, but it is a problem everywhere.

Deputy Mulcahy referred to personation. There used to be a correcting mechanism on the electoral register. At every single polling station at election time there used to be a queue of people volunteering to do personation work on behalf of each of the political parties. Unfortunately we just do not have the personnel anymore. Membership of the various political parties has declined over the years. There are other things to do and people join single issue movements.

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