Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The motion asks permission from the House to bring in last minute legislation to deal with a mess created by the Government, particularly by this Minister. The amendment we are being asked to allow to be debated tonight is so late that its request to extend the deadline dates for registration must be backdated to 25 November.

The irony is that the amendment the Minister is now asking the House to give permission to introduce is the same as the proposal the Labour Party made less than four weeks ago that the deadline date for registration should be extended. The Minister refused that request three weeks ago and continued to do so until last week when, belatedly, he was forced to introduce this amendment to extend the deadline date by a period of two weeks.

It is not the first time the Minister has acted belatedly on this issue. He spoke about the problems with the electoral register as if it was a problem that was the creation and responsibility of every party in this House, but that is not the case. The problems with the register derive in the main from the way this country has developed in the past ten years, coinciding with the life of the present Government. We are repeatedly told that one third of the country's housing stock has been built in the past ten years, and that is so. That is why we have a problem with the register. Those houses were not visited by local authorities and the register was not updated for those dwellings.

We have seen changes in the past decade in the ways in which people live and work. Someone calling to a house now may not get access. It might be a gated community with an electronic code key-pad to allow entry to apartment blocks. Even if he or she gets past that, residents will be out at work or collecting their children from a crèche. The problems, therefore, in compiling the electoral register have increased in the past ten years.

In addition, the local authorities facing the largest problems in compiling the register in the country's fastest growing areas are the same authorities that are stretched with the taking in charge of housing, provision of roads and sanitary services and planning problems. I know this is the case because I raised the issue with the Minister a year ago when I became aware that a local authority, Kildare County Council, had requested additional resources from the Minister to update the electoral register and he had responded by refusing.

The problem with the electoral register did not happen overnight. It was documented in a series of articles in The Sunday Tribune and it was an issue that I raised in the House on behalf of the Labour Party, which proposed that the census process could have been used to update the register. This was dismissed by an arrogant Government. It claimed it could not be done and that it would interfere with the privacy and confidentiality of the census process. This need not have been the case. All that was required was that the census enumerators would be given an additional form which they would use to update the names of the people who were entitled to be on the electoral register and return that form to the local authority. This suggestion was dismissed.

A Private Members' proposal introduced by the Labour Party in the earlier part of this year included a proposal that PPS numbers might be used. This too was shot down by the Government. When confronted with the incontrovertible evidence that the register was totally out of date, the Minister ended up sending, in many cases, the very same census enumerators who had been out in April to retrace their steps and to redo or attempt to redo what they could have easily done much more efficiently in April. The result, as we now know, is that a new problem has been created. A total of half a million names have been removed from the electoral register, 380,000 have been added and 170,000 that it is believed are people who are normally entitled to vote have been deleted from the register because they were not at home or they did not respond to the letter. These are people who, if they do not get back on to the register, will in many cases turn up at polling stations whenever the general election is called, only to be told that their right to vote has been removed from them.

When the Second Stage of this Bill to extend voting rights to prisoners was taken in the House, I suggested to the Minister that the problems of the electoral register should be dealt with in this Bill. He would not hear of it. I tried again on Committee Stage but the Minister similarly would not hear of it. Here we are now at the eleventh hour with a proposal to extend the date to 9 December and this must be backdated to 25 November as if we had never been talking about the electoral register for the past number of months.

This is coming from a Government whose contribution to the electoral process over the past number of years was the daft, irresponsible and reckless waste of €60 million of taxpayers' money on buying an electronic voting system that we cannot use. These were the people who were so keen to be the great modernisers in Europe of electoral law and processes that they went off harum-scarum to buy an electronic voting system that cannot be used and which the Commission on Electronic Voting has said in no uncertain terms is unreliable and wide open to abuse. The Government could not even keep the electoral register accurate and could not assemble an accurate list of people entitled to vote.

I recall the Taoiseach at the time of the controversy over electronic voting poking fun at the Opposition, saying that we were not keeping up with the times. He said they were using it in India and why could we not vote electronically. What is his contribution to the issue of the state of the electoral register? It is to say that the claims about the electoral register are nonsense. He specifically stated:

There are still some people who did not answer the door when people called and did not answer the letters. If people refuse to check the website and listen to the ads that have been plonked in the media for weeks and do nothing, there is nothing you can do. You cannot force them to go on the register.

In other words, the Government's failure has now become, according to the Taoiseach, the failure of the hard-working people in this country who were not at their door when the person from the local authority called because they were out at work or they were stuck in traffic getting home from work or they were collecting the children from the childminder or were too busy with their daily lives to deal with this issue. The Taoiseach and the Government are out of touch with the reality of the lives of people in this country.

I welcome the proposal to extend the date to 9 December because I have been calling for an extension for some time. However, it is not good enough. One of the reasons it is not good enough is that the information which those of us who are engaged in the political process, those of us in political parties, rely on has not been made available to us. I thank the Minister for accepting the principle of the amendment even though he has his own wording for it. The Labour Party proposal is that the Data Protection Acts will not be used as an obstacle to a list of the deletions being compiled.

The problem is that the Act will be amended to allow for the compilation of a list of deletions but by the time we get it, we will not be able to use it because the date of 9 December will be upon us. For that practical reason, if for no other reason, I ask the Minister that when we come to deal with the detail of the amendment, to extend the date of 9 December as this does not give sufficient time for us to make our contribution to the updating of the register. I regret that we are in this eleventh hour situation. We have another mess which has been created by a Government which has really lost the run of itself.

I listened with some amusement and some sadness to the many speeches that were made at the recent Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis, the general tone of which was that nobody can run or govern the country but Fianna Fáil. Any of us would make a better job of this than they are making. None of us would have ended up in a situation where the electoral register, the basic document on which our democracy is founded and run, is in such a sorry state as it is now. The belated attempts being made to put it right are resulting in new problems which the Government is only belatedly coming to even recognise, much less resolve.

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