Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

I move amendment No. 8:

In page 4, line 20, to delete "place" and substitute "constituency".

This amendment arises from a submission that the Labour Party received from the Irish Penal Reform Trust. The submission drew my attention to the possibility that many prisoners were homeless before they were committed to prison. The Bill currently proposes to deem, for the purposes of registering those prisoners as voters, that they are ordinarily resident in the "place" where they would have been residing if they had not been detained in prison. I seek to change the relevant section to provide that prisoners be registered in the "constituency" in which they would have been residing if they had not been imprisoned. I am trying to make a wider provision for two reasons. First, it will not be possible to deem that people who were homeless before they went to prison had been residing in a "place" because they will not have an address that can be used to show they were residing there. Therefore, it is possible that people might not be capable of being registered if they were homeless before they were imprisoned. Second, it may not be appropriate in some cases for people to be deemed to have been resident in a place prior to their incarceration. For example, the prisoner may have been convicted of a serious offence, the victims of which are still residing in the place where the prisoner originally resided. I am thinking about horrendous cases of sexual abuse involving members of families, for example. It might not be appropriate, in the interests of the victims of the crime in question, for the prisoner to be deemed for the purposes of registration to be residing in the place where he or she is living, and to be registered at that place. For the reasons I have mentioned, it would be better to give consideration to the prisoner's "constituency" rather than to his or her place of residence.

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