Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Chair to bear with me.

I welcome that the Government has lowered the voting age to 17 but we advocate that people should be able to vote at 16 and the electoral process should become an integral part of the CPSE course at second level in the context of political and electoral education.

We must move away from the current system of registration to reduce the possibility of fraud. The electoral register might have been okay decades ago when rent and rates collectors called to every house. This went on until 1979 but that will never happen again because of electronic transfers and so on. In addition, town councillors were in office until recently. One of the useful functions they performed was they knew where most people lived in their area because they were dealing with smaller electoral areas. They had local knowledge and they could add people to the register who should have been registered and highlight to council officials when they noticed others were on the register twice. Sinn Féin wants to make sure we have an accurate electoral register. Town councillors and rent and rates collectors monitored it locally along with the local authority's field workers. That role has been reduced because local authorities have had to cut back due to staff shortages.

There are two other important factors, one of which is mobility in the housing market. One would see a different picture if one read a telephone book from 20 years ago. Groups of families lived in certain areas and there was not much movement. Nowadays, that has changed and officials need to take on board the increased mobility in the housing market as people buy, rent and lease property. It is difficult to keep track of them. There is a much more flexible housing market than 30, 40 or 50 years ago. We have not adapted to the 21st century. We are trying to use a method that was used in the early and middle part of the 20th century and we cannot continue with that.

The final factor is jobs. Few people work around the corner from where they live and if they do, they are lucky. Many people live a distance away from their workplace and they must travel to work and they change jobs more frequently than in the past. There is also inward and outward migration. The only way to maintain an accurate register of electors is to use a system based on PPS numbers.

On polling day for the 2009 local elections, I met people in Portlaoise looking for Railway Street as they tried to find the polling station. They were supposed to be living in the town. If they lived in the town, they should have known where Railway Street is. They had polling cards in their hands but that told me they were not living in the town.

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