Emmet Stagg (Kildare North, Labour)

Will the Minister of State expand on what he said about the employment of unemployed people as enumerators for the census? He seemed to have got the impression from the previous question that this would be a top-up on their dole. These people are fairly well paid and it would be a job with experience for people. I ask the Minister of State - the previous question was in the same vein - to insist that those who are to be employed on the census are unemployed rather than those who already have jobs or large pensions. Many of those employed previously have been people who did not need the employment who were already on very hefty pensions. I doubt it is illegal to exclude certain people and am sure the Minister of State can exclude whoever he likes. I ask for a special effort to be made in this regard and for the Minister of State to ensure that the 5,000 jobs go to some of our 450,000 unemployed.

I have been puzzled by another issue which I believe gave rise to flaws in the last census. During the madness we call the boom many people put up almost impenetrable gates on their communities. Census forms can be posted to the people in question, but how the enumerators get the forms back is beyond me. I am puzzled by how the enumerators were even to find a way in to these communities to retrieve the census forms. One must know the code to open the gates and one cannot get at the letter boxes without the code. The postman has the code but I do not know whether the enumerators would have it. I suggest that many people in these gated communities were not counted in the last census. A question on the census form should ask whether the person resides in a gated community. This would give us some idea of the number of people who have locked themselves away from the rest of society. This information might be a useful planning tool for the Government in the future.

Another question asked on the census was whether people used a car to travel to work. That is useless information on its own. If the question was what route the person took to go to work, we would have real information from a transport planning point of view. We should also ask how many cars the household had. This would be more useful information from the point of view of planning.

Deputy Kehoe raised a question that exercises all our minds, namely, constituency boundaries. I understand that at the time of the most recent census a decision was made in a court case - I stand to be corrected on this if I am wrong - that the preliminary figures could be used to determine boundaries and that changes could be made on the basis of those figures. I know that case was taken, but am not sure of the result. I understand what I have said to be the case.

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