Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I welcome this Bill, which the Labour Party will be supporting. It arises from the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Hirst v. the United Kingdom, which established the right of prisoners to vote. The Labour Party supports that right.

There are a number of issues I wish to raise at this stage and, perhaps, pursue further on Committee Stage. I have received a commentary on the Bill from the Irish Penal Reform Trust which has identified three areas where it considers the Bill needs to be amended. The first issue is the requirement in section 2 that proof of residency in a particular constituency be shown by the prisoner concerned. It points out that many prisoners are homeless or have no fixed abode at the point where they are committed to prison and, therefore, may not be in a position to prove they have residence in a particular constituency, and if they cannot prove they are resident in a particular constituency presumably they cannot be registered to vote. That is an issue that needs to be addressed.

The second issue is the requirement in section 4 that a prisoner applying to register as a voter may have to provide additional information or documents to satisfy the registration authorities that he or she is entitled to be registered to vote. Again the Irish Penal Reform Trust points out that prisoners may not have access to those documents while in prison and that they could be disenfranchised if they cannot produce the documentation. It raises the question whether it is necessary for such documentation to be presented since, clearly, the State already knows the identity and has satisfied itself of the identity of the prisoner, as have the courts, and that there should be another way of dealing with that issue.

The third issue raised by the Irish Penal Reform Trust is that if the legislation is to be effective it will require accompanying complementary prison policy governing access to registration and to ballots. It is one thing for prisoners to have a right enshrined in legislation but it is another matter when it comes to be operated in the prison. The whole issue of the way this will work in practice needs to be teased out somewhat further on Committee Stage.

There is a further issue which is not concerned with registration of the prisoner as a voter but with the prisoner's exercise of his or her right as a voter, the actual casting of the vote. As I understand it, the procedure being provided for is a postal voting procedure. A process is set down whereby that is to be witnessed. There are obligations on prison officers and so on to ensure the vote is returned. The difficulty that arises, one that will have to be addressed, is how the privacy of the prisoner's vote is protected and how the integrity of the prisoner's voting intention is protected.

People who are in prison are not free. We have become aware, as recently as this summer, of the degree to which the State is failing in its duty to protect those committed to prison, of the stories about the way in which prisoners are brutalised and the way in which a prisoner was killed during the summer. We have had the report of the visiting committees and the criticisms that Mr. Justice Kinlen made of the way in which the prisons are run and the way in which the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform is supervising the running of prisons. To be blunt, if the State cannot protect the lives of prisoners, their physical safety and bodily integrity, while in prison, I do not have a great deal of confidence that the administration of our prisons would be able to protect the secrecy and the integrity of a prisoner's vote.

I will need to hear more, when this issue is debated on Committee Stage, about how steps are taken to ensure that prisoners are not subjected to undue pressures, either from fellow prisoners or, possibly — I am not casting reflection on prison staff — from prison staff or individual members of prison staff when they come to exercise their voting intention. They are not free in the same way as every other voter. That is an area that will have to be addressed on Committee Stage.

The Bill is essentially about the registration of voters, in this case the registration of prisoners as voters, but there is a wider issue relating to the registration of voters which has been the subject of discussion in the House which I and other colleagues have raised here on a number of occasions, that is, the state of the current electoral register. In response to raising the matter with the Minister, to be fair to him, he has engaged in a new voter registration process and has provided some additional resources to local authorities for same. As we speak, the staff who have been engaged by local authorities are out there trying to improve the electoral register.

I have a concern about the way in which that is being done and I wish to put it to the Minister. We raised concerns about the electoral register, the multiple entries of people on the register and the fact that the register was out of date in many places. Clearly, many were on the register who were no longer living at the addresses at which they were registered. In putting it right, there is a grave danger that another very serious wrong will be done to many people, that is, that people will be removed from the register.

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