Jan O'Sullivan (Limerick City, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The more we go into this, the more one would want to be a learned Jesuit to figure it all out and I am certainly not a learned Jesuit, for a whole lot of different reasons. My questions are somewhat similar to the others. For the people who are in the unfortunate position of being in the cold storage seats in Dublin or in Ireland South, there is provision as to what will happen to them if they are the Attorney General, on an Oireachtas committee or a Minister, and so on. However, what about the ordinary citizen who has been working in a job and gets elected to the European Parliament and, therefore, does not have a job to return to if they have left it, or may not be able to go back to their job on a temporary basis because they might at any point become a Member of the European Parliament? Where do they stand? There is the question, which I raised on Second Stage and which Deputy Darragh O'Brien has just raised, of whether they get paid, have an office or have a job to do, even though they are not taking their seats in the Parliament. It is a question for people who are thinking of running in the European elections in either of those constituencies and we need to get as much clarity as possible. We all hope it will not come to that but it may well do, even more so if there is a second referendum in the United Kingdom, which I would like to see, as most of us would.

My second question relates to the variance to which the Minister of State referred in his contribution, that is, the 21% variance between Ireland Midlands-North-West and Ireland South, and whether there is an issue of enfranchisement for the people who live in Ireland South as opposed to those who live in Ireland Midlands-North-West. There may be a legal issue in respect of adequate representation in the European Parliament.

These are difficult questions and there is a lot of what-iffery about it. Nevertheless, if people are thinking of running in the European elections in either of those constituencies, they will have to ask themselves those questions. If they realistically do not think they are going to be in the top couple of seats - and anyone in a party like mine would not expect to be, although it might be different for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael as they may run two or three candidates - then it is a question for people who are considering running. It is also a question for the electorate to know whether we will have the normal level of representation we would expect for our population.

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