Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

Deputy Rabbitte listed his complaints about the register. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Roche, has actively tried to improve the register. The best way is to get people to check the register. The best way of doing that, as was the case with the census, is by putting people on the street to do it. We can have any number of bland ideas about this number, that number, social welfare consolidation and the rest of it, but most of us who have been Members for some time and involved in general elections know that the only way to correct the register and get it right is if local authority officials or political activists go out and send back information to be checked. That is how the system has worked since the foundation of the State. There will not be any other system. That is what the enumerators are doing in the census.

Over recent months Deputy Rabbitte and his colleagues have been applying pressure, and rightly so, for the Government to look seriously at the question of using the census enumerators, on the back of the census, to do this job. That has been their strategy over recent weeks but they seem to have gone off that idea for some reason. Is it because they think it might work?

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