Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour)

I would like to ask the Minister for Finance about the electoral register mess. Will he take a personal interest in the situation that has been created? Some 600,000 names were removed from the register but the problem is they are not the correct names. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, who is responsible for the register, describes these as "inadvertent deletions". An estimated 20% of people on the register should not be on it but, instead, the wrong names have been deleted. When The Sunday Tribune, in particular, brought this matter to public attention, we asked the Government to use the census process so enumerators would give citizens an electoral register form as well to be collected when they returned for the census form but that was ignored. We sought amending legislation to permit compliance with the Data Protection Commissioner's view that access to the information stored by utility companies and others should be facilitated but the Minister also pooh-poohed that. We are back to "inadvertent deletions" and the attitude is to blame county councils and the citizen. However, it is the Government's task to maintain the electoral register. Credit companies have more reliable quality data than the register.

I suggest a few measures the Government might take urgently. The first is to extend the deadline to register beyond 25 November. It is not possible to deal with the scale of inaccuracy between now and 25 November.

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