Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)

He had many people working for him disenfranchise all the people who had a previous conviction. It gave a terrible picture of a democracy for people who were no longer in prison and had discharged their obligation. They were pursued to get them off the electoral register because of their race and political situation. That was terrible. In Florida, it is estimated that one in three of all black people are denied the right to vote.

It is worth making the point that although our country is only recently getting used to multiculturalism and we do not have a particularly high number of ethnic minorities in prison, there is a certainly a class issue with regard to the prison population and the denial of prisoner voting rights. It impinges much more dramatically on the votes of working class members of the electorate.

In the transnational context, the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right of everyone to vote. We are not legislating in isolation, nor is this just some altruistic measure by the Government or the Oireachtas. We have been remiss in not doing this earlier and it is good that we are finally acting in this regard.

It is entirely right that the Bill seeks to extend the postal vote to prisoners. When this issue was first mooted, there was some alarm that voting booths would be set up in prisons with all the accompanying costs to the State. As an aside, I note what has happened to those wonderful counting machines which the Minister, Deputy Noel Dempsey, ordered and the Minister, Deputy Cullen, delivered. We have now learned that one can play video games on them, as well as corrupting the entire voting process by means of a simple key. It shows just how unrealistic the whole process was. It is unacceptable that it can be interfered with so easily, quickly and effectively. While one may have been voting on such machines in Wicklow. Louth or elsewhere, the reality is that the process is now in serious doubt. Much money has been spent on it but the Minister of the day should have listened to the views of the Opposition, particularly those of my colleague, Deputy Allen, who strongly argued that the Minister should have sought alternative opinions.

The voting system is a matter for all of us. It is not the Government's voting system, even though Ministers have made it their system; it should be a collective system. Unless our work on issues such as the franchise and how we change the voting system is done with everyone's consent and agreement we will continue to have a debacle such as the current one. It is politically unacceptable that on these important matters the Government did not listen and is still not heeding the voice of the Opposition. We now have hundreds of electronic voting machines which are costing a fortune to store in air-conditioned offices. Perhaps they should be preserved as a work of art dedicated to the memory of this Government when the time comes.

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