Seán Kenny (Dublin North East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will share my time with Deputies Kevin Humphreys and Joanna Tuffy.

The purpose of the Electoral (Amendment) (Dáil Constituencies) Bill is to provide for the number of members to be elected to Dáil Éireann, for the revision of constituencies and for the number of members to be elected for each constituency. The Bill implements the recommendations of the report of the constituency commission on constituencies and on the European Parliament constituencies. The commission was established under the Electoral Act 1997 to report on the constituencies for the election of members to Dáil Éireann and the European Parliament in light of the results of the 2011 census of population.

This means that in line with the programme for Government, the number of Deputies elected to this House will be reduced. One of the most significant changes of the Bill will be to amalgamate two large constituencies, Dublin North-Central and Dublin North-East, where I have spent most all of my career as an elected representative. I am sorry to see Dublin North-East go, as I am sure are many people in politics, both currently and formerly. Some distinguished Dublin North-East Deputies have been Labour Party Deputies. James Larkin was a Labour Deputy in the 1930s and his son, Denis Larkin, was elected as a Labour Party Deputy in the 1950s and 1960s. Conor Cruise O'Brien was elected for Labour in the 1960s and 1970s. Noel Browne was also a Deputy in part of the constituency during the late 1970s.

The environmentalist, Sean Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus was elected as an Independent Deputy in the early 1980s. The new constituency now bears his name, which is a fitting tribute to him. However, not everyone is completely enamoured with the new constituency title. I met a Dublin North-East constituent recently who asked, when I told him that he would soon be in Dublin Bay North, whether that meant he would get more money for his house if he sold it. I could not answer that.

We cannot refer to the demise of Dublin North-East without referring to Fianna Fáil's Charles J. Haughey, who in his time dominated the constituency like no other. When I first came to live in Raheny, he was the local political boss. His election campaigns have been written about before. At election time, I remember seeing builders' trucks going around putting up Fianna Fáil posters and leaving no room for any others to put up theirs. They also erected gigantic Fianna Fáil hoardings at strategic locations. One could not move anywhere in Dublin North-East without having CJ gazing sternly down at one. His election campaigning was the stuff of Tammany Hall type politics, which involved the spending of massive sums of money on electioneering, money that we now know belonged to somebody else. Most people knew that at the time, but just could not prove it. Thankfully that type of politics has now been consigned to the past.

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