Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The Government does not want to present the Ministers who were responsible for the debacle, the waste of public money and the threat to our democracy to account for themselves. Let us repeat what they attempted to do. Let us look at what is contained in the report of the commission on electronic voting. It concluded that if the Labour Party and Fine Gael, in particular, had not challenged the proposals on electronic voting in 2003, the people would be going to the polls to vote using a system, first, which had never been fully tested. There was no complete end-to-end testing of the system from the point where the voter cast his or her vote to the point where a result was announced. There was no joined-up test. Second, it was a system under which nobody would have been able to confirm that a person's vote had been recorded because there was no paper trail. There was no paper record and no way of auditing the system. The commission reported that it was a system which could be hacked into and interfered with. We were told that it was a system where the software for the counting of the votes was unreliable, in other words, we could have ended up with any result with no way of checking it.

There has been much focus, rightly so, on the waste of €60 million in purchasing machines which will never be used, but the biggest scandal surrounding electronic voting was the underhand attempt of a Government which will do anything to stay in power to foist on the people a system of voting that was as unreliable as the one it proposed. On top of this, it was going to hand control and ownership of the system's software and associated codes to a private company located outside the State. That is the biggest scandal associated with electronic voting, greater than the scandal of wasting €60 million of the taxpayer's money in an attempt to introduce the system. No Minister in the Government has been made accountable for this waste of public money and the attempt to steal — a word I use advisedly — the democracy that belongs to the people.

As Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Noel Dempsey dreamed up the scheme, yet he has never been held to account. When his successor, Deputy Cullen, inherited the scheme, he was asked by Opposition Members not to proceed without all-party agreement but in a burst of arrogance he refused to listen. Despite wasting €60 million of the taxpayers' hard-earned money on purchasing a system which will not now be used, both Ministers remain in office. The very man who authorised the signing of the contract and who paid €60 million to purchase electronic voting machines was sent out a couple of weeks ago to spend €600 million on a second-hand bridge. This Government, and the aforementioned Ministers in particular, have a lot to answer for. However, the Taoiseach has refused to allow the House to debate the issue, which means our only opportunity to debate it is on the occasion of this Bill. Not only are the Members of this Government a crowd of wasters but they are also cowards because they will not come to this House to answer for their mistakes.

Were it not for the calls made repeatedly by this side of the House, the Government would have done nothing about the electoral register. I recall putting a question to the present Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government regarding a request made by Kildare County Council for additional funding to update its electoral register. The council made a case to the Minister that the growth in population and the degree to which development had taken place in the local authority area had given rise to a problem in respect of the electoral register. However, the Minister refused the request for additional resources to update the register. When I put my question to the Minister, he stated there was no necessity to provide resources because it was a matter for the local authority. It was only when Deputies spoke about their experiences of the inaccuracy of the electoral register and a series of articles was published in the Sunday Tribune and elsewhere that the Minister, who had already rejected several valid suggestions from this side of the House, was forced to act.

The Labour Party proposed to address the issue by taking advantage of the opportunity presented in the census but the Minister tried to distort our position by claiming we were trying to interfere with the confidentiality of the census process, which was untrue. We were simply pointing out that because census takers would already be calling to every household in the country, it made sense to supply them with additional forms that would determine who was registered or entitled to vote in a particular household. We made our suggestion because we understood that the census process was the most reliable opportunity of addressing the increasing difficulty of reaching people at home. If our proposals had been taken up, the register would have been rectified and the personal public service number system could have been used to keep it updated and to provide controls at polling stations. However, all our proposals were rejected and it was only when the penny dropped at the 11th hour for the slow learners in this Government that it was decided to recommence the process by sending out local authority officials and re-recruited census enumerators to collect information for the register. While I acknowledge that the electoral register has improved as a result of that exercise, it is not yet accurate. During Question Time last week, I drew attention to the fact that the register is out by an average of 2,000 to 3,000 voters in each constituency. We all know elections often turn on handfuls of votes, so an inaccurate register is not good for our democracy.

This Bill proposes to end the absurdity whereby assentors to the election papers of Independent Dáil candidates have to attend local authority offices at the same time in order to submit nomination papers. That process was introduced to replace the deposit system, which I note the Minister is reintroducing through the back door. He claims he is reintroducing deposits as an alternative and that he is satisfied it is constitutionally robust to do so. We should remember, however, that the system of assentors came about in response to the Supreme Court decision in the Riordan case that the deposit system was not valid. That decision raises questions about whether the provision for a deposit system, albeit one involving relatively modest amounts in the context of what some candidates now spend, will stand a constitutional challenge. There have been a number of instances, including as recently as this week, in which the Government introduced legislation which was subsequently found to be incapable of standing a challenge in the courts, with the result that Ministers have had to rush into the House in the dead of night after Private Members' Business to correct the mistakes their arrogance led them to make. I am concerned that the provision for deposit systems will be another such instance.

When we last debated the revision of constituencies, I drew the Minister's attention to the likelihood that the provisional census figures, which were not known at the time, would give rise to two problems. First, it was possible that some constituencies would exceed the maximum ratio of population to Deputy. That has turned out to be the case. Second, the variation in the ratio of population to Deputy per constituency threatened to be so wide as to raise doubts about the constitutionality of the composition of constituencies. The provisional census figures have since been published but we are going to hold an election on the basis of the existing constituency configuration. The Minister has stated that the official census figures are the basis for determining the matter. He might tell the House when he expects the official figures to be available or whether his Department has made any inquiries in that regard and what effect the matter is likely to have on the date of the election.

As far as this Bill is concerned, I have no difficulty in agreeing to Second Stage and I look forward to hearing the Minister's response to the issues I have raised.

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