Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent)

An accurate electoral register is the cornerstone of any democracy. I doubt that the huge problems that exist with the current review will be dealt with in the next fortnight. The failure to provide information on the deletions is a case in point. The default position taken by some local authorities, including my own, is that if one is not listed one cannot vote.

While the population of Kildare has increased by 20,000 in the past four years, the register is now smaller by thousands. It is not a question of these changes being accounted for by people who died or by duplicate entries. When one examines the register one will find that not every home in a housing estate has an entry. For example, one will see entries for houses number one, number 13, number 25 etc., and the gaps in between clearly show that people are being excluded. It is easy to see how this would occur in a constituency like mine where people are so time poor due to travelling to work times etc. One in five people have been chopped off the register in Naas, Clane and Maynooth, while it is one in four in Celbridge. Very little fieldwork was done in Leixlip for a particular reason.

The online version is simply the draft register. No one can check the online version for changes between now and February. There is the possibility of doing something meaningful with this so that people can check if they have been added to the register. The supplementary register requirements could be changed so that while identification is required, people are not required to go to Garda stations to be added to it.

Everyone is entitled to be added to the register, but fieldworkers have told me that the variation in entitlements has not been properly scrutinised. People who are only entitled to vote in local or European elections will now be allowed to vote in the general election. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed in its own right.

I do not believe local authorities are the correct agencies to carry out this fieldwork any longer. They do not have the relationship on the doorstep they used to have when the domestic rates regime was in place. Using an agency like An Post, which has a direct daily relationship with householders, is a better way to deal with this. We must learn some lessons from this. Money spent on this exercise will be wasted if there is not an ongoing corrective process.

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