Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

I welcome the legislation and I congratulate Deputy Gilmore on having the foresight to introduce it, although he has been discussing it for a considerable time. The rest of us are also concerned about the register.

I received a query from a person who could not obtain a permit to park outside his house. Disc parking was recently introduced in the area and he contacted my office because he did not want to ask his landlord to sign the permit application, given he is a little stroppy about such formalities. Six other people live in the house and he did not want to endure the expense of going to a doctor to ask him to sign a letter. I asked whether he was on the electoral register because I told him that if he was, it proved he lived on the street and, therefore, he would be entitled to a parking permit. However, he is not on the register and I asked him why. He replied that he did not know and that no one had ever called to ask him whether he had registered. He lives in a house on a busy street with six other people and no one ever called.

The electoral register should not only give an individual the ability to vote but it should provide local authorities with information about him or her. The legislation will ensure the information contained in the register will not be abused, which is important. Increasingly, the principal occupants of a house, usually a mother and father, or the principal tenants will not register anybody else at the address because of the implications that has for service charges, which they cannot afford. The information on the register should only be used for voting and identification purposes. Recently I did a mail shot in a small area in my constituency. A total of 64 letters were returned from houses on one street with the message, "Not known at this address". However, I used the electoral register to issue the mail shot. Nobody had bothered to update the register or to find out where the people had moved. It is incredible that this should happen but it is the reality.

I am not sure that voting should be compulsory, even though, as politicians, it could mean Valhalla or Utopia for us, but it should be compulsory to register to vote, regardless of whether one exercises the option. As other Members said, how many of us have stood outside polling stations on election day and met people who were distraught as they left because they were not registered to vote? They were registered for the previous election but their names had been removed. This is occurring more frequently because local authorities do not have the wherewithal, financially or physically, to maintain the register.

The commissioner should not only have the power to maintain the register, he or she should also have the power to determine the location of polling stations. I am sick and tired of being approached by elderly people complaining about polling stations being moved to inaccessible locations resulting in them not voting for the first time in their lives. That carry on is very political and I have witnessed it too often in Cork to believe otherwise.

By ensuring the electoral register is maintained, the State is ensuring our democracy is healthy. A number of politicians, such as the Minister of State's constituency colleague, do not have to worry about being re-elected because they had surpluses of 5,000 last time out. When I was first elected to the local authority in 1985, following the 16th count I was two votes ahead of my nearest challenger. Such margins will be repeated more often. The last seat in the Minister of State's constituency in 2002 was taken by less than ten votes. One can imagine the effect of an inaccurate register in such circumstances. That was not the only seat determined by a few votes and more seats will won by similar margins in future elections. If we are not careful, we will be to blame for people not voting and we will no longer be able to use the excuse that they are not interested. We will not know if they are not interested because they will not be registered.

See this speech in context