Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

This system cost us €52 million. We could not use it because it was not reliable and it costs us almost €1 million a year to store it in various centres around the country. I will ask the Taoiseach about remarks made at the weekend by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Roche, reported in a newspaper as follows: "Roche plans to press ahead with e-voting despite security flaws." The Minister also told TV3:

They will be used in the election and referenda after 2007. I am not going to scrap them. We have actually paid good Irish taxpayers' money for them.

The last part of that is true — we certainly paid good Irish taxpayers' money for them. The Minister's remarks followed the report by the Commission on Electronic Voting to the effect that they were not of sufficient quality to enable their use to be confidently recommended and that functional testing revealed programming errors. The Taoiseach then told me that a Cabinet sub-committee was examining the issue, which reminds me of the remark of the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, on the protocol to the Maastricht treaty, to the effect that the unfortunate and much-maligned Fianna Fáil backbenchers reminded him of chimpanzees with a screwdriver behind a television set. After the Cabinet sub-committee was set up the Swedish group of computer enthusiasts said the hardware was not secure and explained why in their report. Do the remarks of the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Roche, come in the wake of the Cabinet sub-committee's report? Has the Cabinet sub-committee reported or is the Minister misleading us? Does the Government intend that these machines will be used, but like St. Augustine's plea, "not yet", not in the general election 2007 or whenever, but after that? Is that the recommendation of the Cabinet sub-committee?

The Minister says it will not continue to cost €800,000 to store the machines because he will store most of them at some central location guarded by the Army. I would not have thought there was any difficulty in guarding them because they are useless but that seems to be the use the Minister has in mind for the Army. Will the Taoiseach tell the House the Government's position?

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