John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am glad the Minister is here. I compliment him again on his industriousness since he became Minister. He has piled really constructive Bills into the House and passed them. He has been flexible in accepting meaningful and sensible amendments and suggestions when they come forward, either from his own side or from the Opposition. I can spend an hour speaking on this, as I am sure any Deputy could, so I will narrow the focus.

There is a lovely council official called Sean McNally who used to call to my door in pre-Covid days, usually during the summer, after working hours, to check the register. As the Minister knows, that has not happened in a few years. I was in touch with the local residents' association in the last months. It had formed a new executive and checked the register. This is for the officials who are listening. Five of the six people newly elected to the executive, who wanted to work on behalf of the residents' association, were not registered. They would not have had the opportunity and there was not a register check over the preceding period. We are dealing, as the Minister knows from the Customs House, with a seriously outdated electoral register. That is the first point I want to make and reinforce, which has probably been made already. That happened through no fault of their own. There was a significant change and turnover in houses in that estate over the three-year period.

How will we tackle apartments and access to apartments? I would say to the officials who are taking notes and to the Minister that canvassing is part and parcel of the electoral process here. The more gated and sealed-off developments we have, the more inaccessible they are, and it becomes impossible to reach constituents. How do census enumerators in Dublin get in to check these apartments and obtain the information that is so valuable for planning? Many of these developments are managed and pay maintenance fees. There is very little recourse to the local authority, but they have recourse to the national Government. It is simply impossible to reach these people in these closed, electronically-gated apartment complexes. We need to find some way to enable politicians of all hues to exercise their democratic right in seeking the votes of the public and to enable these people to have their democratic right to exercise their franchise at election time.

We take many things for granted. There is a term that I use in the warmest possible sense, though I know some people use it pejoratively, "foreigners". I notice in local elections that a substantial number of central and eastern European and non-European residents in Ireland who are entitled to vote in local elections are simply not aware of that right, because the State keeps them in the dark. It never makes any effort to inform them that they are entitled to cast a vote, at least locally, which we need to change. A couple of thousand people in my constituency do not even recognise that they have the franchise. That is a big job for the electoral commission. Language is clearly an issue there. Information needs to be produced in multilingual formats. It is also a matter of just bothering to let people know that they can cast a vote and have a say in the locality.

We take voting for granted here. A Russian friend of mine came here in the 2000s, settled, became a citizen and was very excited to cast their first vote. My friend expressed surprise after filling out the ballot paper that we use a pencil, which is provided to mark the register. It took a second for the penny to drop with me. The implication was that if you marked the numbers 1, 2 and 3, down to 10 or 12, with a pencil, it was possible to erase that. That was the culture from which my friend had come. That would never have struck an Irish person. It could be an off-putting thing for non-Irish people who become citizens here as part of the new Irish. Someone told me that when others exercise their franchise on the ballot paper, if they just vote 1, 2 and 3, they fill all the other boxes with an X to ensure that no one else can interfere with the preferences in those boxes. We take many things for granted. We live in a liberal democracy, which has been protected so well. That is why we did not embrace electronic voting. Are we not glad, in light of interference with elections across the globe by Russia, that we did not embrace electronic voting? I wonder where we would be now.

These are simple things that we take for granted. I hope there has been outreach to different communities to get their views on what it is like for them to vote or not vote in Ireland, or what their experience of the democratic process is and their suggestions about it. The Electoral Reform Bill 2022 is vital. I remember watching the movie "Brexit" on a Saturday.

I recall watching it the following day again, when all the allegations, facts and evidence provided at that time - and the different rules and laws - indicated that campaign organisers were harvesting massive amounts of people's personal data and utilising it to target them to vote in particular ways. I cannot prove it, but I have a sense from the last election that the harvesting of data is not unknown in Ireland. The targeting of voters based on that harvested data is certainly not unknown, but it was not regulated against.

When we were in opposition, our party leader and I used to have the odd robust exchange about electoral posters, corrugated board and all that kind of thing. He is very convinced of the need for postering as part of the electoral process. I agree that people need to know who they are voting for. I do not favour the continental approach of having a billboard in every town on which everybody slaps up posters and it just becomes a blancmange of stuff, but we need to restrict the numbers and look at those rules.

Our colleague, Deputy Lawless, drafted a very good Bill on transparency, not French-style censorship, when we were in opposition. The entire House embraced it. The adoption of much of its content would be a very useful thing to consider as part of this debate on the Bill before the House.

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