Alan Farrell (Dublin North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That is another argument. The point is that there is an imbalance in representation. It is important that there be a re-balance and that is why I am pleased to see the extra seat being allocated to the north side of Dublin and my constituency.

Political reform is not a reduction in the number of Deputies; rather, it is changing and consolidating what they do. It is about defining the boundaries between Deputies, Senators, councillors and mayors such that there is no overlap. Without achieving this, local authority members will continue to bite at the heels of Deputies in the hope that they will replace them at the next election, and Deputies who lose their seats, like so many at the last general election, will continue to regard local authority elections as their saviour. If we do not define the roles of elected representatives, there will be continual rotation among local authority members, Deputies and Senators.

This is a young, growing nation. The number of children born here today rivals that during the baby boom of the 1960s and 1970s. The average age in my constituency is childbearing age. The Department of Education and Skills made massive planning mistakes in the past, as is evident from the fact that 80 students showed up with bags and uniforms to a school in Balbriggan in which they were not even enrolled and which was not capable of supporting them. The Department assumed that when a couple buys a house, they will have a schooling requirement four or five years later. In fact, when a couple buys a house, there is an immediate schooling requirement because they will already have a couple of kids, and potentially more on the way. Failures regarding the planning of strategic local services must not continue. They are not continuing under the Department at present.

We need to be able to plan for the increasing populations in towns such as Swords, Balbriggan, Blanchardstown and Tallaght, and other hotspots of growth around the country, such that we do not need to change the boundaries of constituencies every four or five years. There needs to be representative consistency so there will not be circumstances such as those in which Swords was split in 2008 by the boundary commission. We should not have circumstances such as those in which Portmarnock must be skived off Dublin North to extend the life span of Dublin North-East for couple of years before it finally gives up the ghost and must be put in with another constituency nearby, all with a view to giving Dublin Bay North the ability to sustain itself on an ongoing basis. I appreciate that we will not achieve what I am suggesting on this occasion but I suggest that when the boundary commission is being given its terms of reference in the future, growth will be accounted for sufficiently in the drawing up of constituencies.

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