Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have some reservations, which I have expressed in the House before. I would like to know what the cost of the election would be. The Constitution requires that Seanad elections be carried out by postal vote and only by postal vote, so a postal vote involving millions of electors, potentially hundreds of thousands of them outside of the State, could be very expensive, but I do not know what that figure is. Perhaps the committee does, and I am sure that will be in the report.

Second, I also have some reservations about retaining the different panels as they currently exist. I understand that to change them would require a change in the Constitution, and that is not being proposed. The last iteration of the Manning report that I saw would require pretty much everyone to register to vote again for the Seanad elections. If we open up the franchise to everyone in the State or every citizen abroad, that would require a registration mechanism by which people would register to vote and would then pick a panel on which they wanted to vote, whether it was the University of Dublin, NUI, cultural and educational, industrial and commercial, administrative or some other panel. I think that could be quite a confusing exercise for people. People, when they register to vote, tend to register to vote where they live for their local constituency. Asking them to choose between a number of different panels when they register to vote could cause some confusion. I also think the panels are out of date. They do not really reflect 21st century society. They derive from a papal encyclical in the 1930s that de Valera was very fond of. It was sort of Catholic corporatism. That is from where those particular panels arise.

However, those are just my reservations. I am not determining this or running it or seeking to-----

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