John Gormley (Dublin South East, Green Party)

I thank Deputies on all sides of the House for their contributions to this important debate. Deputies raised a large number of issues across the electoral horizon but in the limited time available I will focus on issues specific to the report of the Constituency Commission. There will be other opportunities to deal with other issues.

I wish to make a general point. Some Deputies have suggested alternatives to the scheme of constituencies recommended by the commission in its report and some Deputies are clearly unhappy with particular recommendations. Many other Deputies, perhaps the majority, and certainly the Fine Gael spokesperson was adamant that we should stick to the recommendations of the commission. I emphasise that it is very important that we maintain the long-established practice of implementing the recommendations of constituency commissions in full.

To reject some of the commission's recommendations would be to revert to the partisan approach of the past when constituency revisions were perceived as having been framed to secure political advantage for the Government of the day. Even minor changes to the commission's recommendations would represent the first step back to the unsatisfactory situation that applied in the past. I, as Minister, do not want to go down that particular road.

Mr. Justice Clarke's judgment last year emphasises the urgent obligation on the Oireachtas to revise constituencies as soon as it becomes clear from a census that the existing constituencies no longer have the level of proportionality that the Constitution requires. I gave examples of the current serious disparities in my earlier contribution. We need to act quickly. The debate showed the strong attachment to county boundaries——

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