Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Leas-Cheann Comhairle as an deis teacht ar ais. I wish to address a couple of issues I believe are important in this debate. We do have a wonderful electoral system in this State. The PR-STV system does provide for very clear representation within the political institutions, which is very important. When we have a system whereby various minority voices are excluded for whatever reason, that leads to real difficulties within the political system. First, those minority voices are very important, and it is important that they have an influence over the direction of the country. We can learn a lot from those minority voices. Also, if minority voices are continuously blocked and they feel they do not have a democratic opportunity to get their point across, that can lead to frustration within a democracy and to negative outcomes as well. It is important that we try to maintain, as much as possible, the best representation within the democracy that we have.

In other countries, such as the United States and Britain, we see that when the representation element is not built within the system it can lead to significant difficulties. In the United States, if a person is not voting for Trump or Biden, he or she literally does not have another option in the system there. That is part of the polarising element that can be found sometimes in the United States. It is the same in Britain. Voters do not have another option because the first-past-the-post system militates against a third or fourth option ever becoming available to people, so they are forced into those two poles, in terms of political choices. I ask the Minister of State to focus on this, if he can, to make sure that in this country we have the most representative political system.

I understand that six-seat constituencies are available to the Minister and the commission under the Constitution, yet we have not seen such constituencies used in this State for probably well over 50 years. When I spoke to a Minister of State recently, I suggested that the country is full of three-seat constituencies, which militate against proper representation, and that we should be moving to six-seat constituencies. The Minister of State said the big parties would not like that. Therein lies one of the difficulties that we have in this entire process. It should not be about what the big parties want in the design of our electoral system. It should be about ensuring that we have the clearest representation possible from the electorate into the number of men and women sitting in this Chamber. That is why I would advise the Minister of State to consider six-seat constituencies. When I look at County Meath, for example, it has six Deputies, but it delivers them through two three-seat constituencies. That could result in a major difficulty because it ensures that sections of the political views of the people of the county are simply never going to be represented in here.

The other element I would like the Minister of State to focus on is the slivers of counties that find themselves in constituencies outside of those counties. Again, in County Meath, we have a sliver of Westmeath, around the Castlepollard to Delvin area, which is part of Meath West and a sliver of the eastern part of the county in the Louth constituency. What happens often times with these types of slivers is that they fall between two stools.

They do not have an electorate large enough to elect a Deputy and, therefore, Deputies in general start to focus their attention on where the electorate population is. For many years, that part of Westmeath did not have a Deputy's constituency office. It now has two, thankfully, as Aontú and Sinn Féin both have offices in that constituency. It is important we try our damnedest to make sure those slivers do not happen because on a county council basis, a political basis and even in the mindset of the people who live in the area, people are aligned to counties. When 6,000 or 7,000 people are appended to another constituency, they often do not get the representation they are entitled to and that is a mistake.

I am reminded of a scene in "Killinaskully", where a lady who looks about 90 years old tells a local politician he can be assured of her vote and adds that he can be assured of her mammy's vote as well. The politician thanks her and inquires how long her mammy has been dead at this stage. A constituent in my county had voting cards sent to him from the age of two. I know numerous people to whom voting cards are sent in a half-dozen locations. It makes a mockery of the register and allows for electoral fraud. When we start to talk about the issue of voter turnout, we are actually talking about voter turnout in the context of a hocus-pocus register. We are not getting the actual turnout in respect of the number of citizens in a constituency who can vote.

The Minister has an opportunity to resolve some of these issues. I ask him to be bold and courageous, to step outside the actions taken over the past 20 to 40 years, to build in six-seater constituencies where they would fit within county lines and where they would give far more representation to citizens, and then make sure the integrity of counties is protected in future.

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