Anthony Lawlor (Kildare North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I, too, am pleased to speak on the Electoral (Amendment) (Dáil Constituencies) Bill 2012. I wonder, however, if the Bill is premature. One of the key elements of the recently established Constitutional Convention is to look at the electoral system and possibly change the way we vote and elect our TDs. We are probably premature in looking at this issue. As a result, counties will be split all over the place. The Constitution stipulates that each constituency must have at least three and no more than five Deputies. This put constraints on what the Constituency Commission could do. As a result, we have a hotchpotch of constituency boundary changes made to soup up the population and meet a Government target of reducing the number of Deputies from 166 to 158.

Is this simply cosmetic? In other countries with similar populations to our own, such as Denmark, Sweden and Finland, Members of Parliament represent roughly the same number of constituents as we do. People compare Ireland to the United Kingdom, our neighbour across the water, where there is one Member of Parliament for every 100,000 people. We see what is happening in the United Kingdom at present, where they do not know whether they want to be in or out of Europe. Our people are properly represented, with one Deputy for every 30,000 people.

I would have preferred to delay the Bill until the Constitutional Convention had made its recommendations. We could then have kept the identity of each individual county, which is most important. We would not, then, have had the hotchpotch that is Roscommon. Over the years, Roscommon has been in Mayo, Galway, Leitrim and Longford. All those counties rejected Roscommon and threw it out again. Maybe Roscommon could be set out with an identity of its own, following the report of the Constitutional Convention.

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