Steven Matthews (Wicklow, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The Bill is the Government legislating for the recommendations of the Electoral Commission. The Joint Committee on Housing, Local Government and Heritage was presented with the general scheme of the Bill and given an opportunity to carry out pre-legislative scrutiny of it, but we waived that opportunity because committee members felt that the commission was an independent and objective body that had made recommendations. Waiving was the right thing to do. I hope there are no amendments to the Bill, although I believe the names of new constituencies were mentioned in this context. That would be an acceptable amendment, but the fingerprints of Deputies or others should not be on the designs of boundaries. We should leave that for an independent commission, as we have done, and that commission was chaired by Ms Justice Baker.

The report was eagerly anticipated by many of us up and down the country, especially in those constituencies where we knew something was going to happen because we knew our populations had surpassed the figure of 30,000 per Deputy. My constituency is Wicklow, whose population had increased to 155,000, so I knew something was going to happen. It could have become two three-seaters, which would have been the worst possible scenario for me, or stayed as a five-seater. It could not have become a six-seater, as the Electoral Commission’s hands were tied and it could not consider six-seaters. We have ended up with a Wicklow-Wexford hybrid constituency and a 4:3:4 division of seats. It is not ideal to have split Wicklow and Wexford, but I stand by the decision. Indeed, we all stand by it because it was arrived at independently and objectively.

We have discussed county boundaries. The commission’s hands were tied by the requirement not to exceed 30,000 while also respecting county boundaries. It described this as a battle between maths and geography. I am not certain that county boundaries are the right way to set up our constituencies. We are all proud of our counties. In the GAA, the county boundary has to be respected. I spoke to people right down in the south west of my constituency. Although they are proud Wicklow people, they would have a closer affinity with Carlow. In the south, they might have a closer social, cultural, recreational, sporting and employment affinity with Wexford. I am not sure we need to stick to county boundaries rigidly. There may be better ways of splitting up electoral areas. We could still represent people, though. When we enter the Dáil, we are national legislators. The legislation and decisions we make in this House should benefit the people of Kerry, Wicklow and Donegal as equally as possible. How we decide to spend budgets should equitably benefit the greatest number of people as possible. People say that, if your county is not at the Cabinet table, you get left out. That should not be the case. We should legislate and make our decisions equitably to benefit the most amount of people as possible. Unfortunately, that does not happen.

I thank the Electoral Commission for reporting on time and doing this work within the three months. The Electoral Reform Act 2022 sets the commission a number of other tasks, one of which is education. There is a fantastic opportunity to increase public knowledge – I do not like to use the word “education” because it sometimes sounds condescending – of what happens in this Chamber. The three years I have been a Deputy have seemed short, given how it has been such an intense time. In those years, I have learned much about how this Chamber and the wider Oireachtas work that I did not know before. When I walk through those gates every morning, I always have a great sense of responsibility. I hope I never lose that, or the sense of privilege and honour I feel coming through the gates in the morning when thinking of the tasks ahead of us and what we have to do.

However, there is a considerable opportunity. In my previous job, I never had the opportunity to scrutinise legislation as closely as I do now. Nobody in their right mind with another job would ever have the time to consider legislation as many of us do to see its various aspects and what is intended. Most of the time, what we are able to pick up on is a social media snippet or video. Conventionally, the bigger parties have more money to spend on click videos, social media and influencing the perception of what goes on in here. The commission has an important role and a fantastic opportunity to bring people on board to show them how the system works.

We will be discussing Private Members' motions tonight and tomorrow. Many believe that if such motions are passed, their recommendations will be implemented, but that is not necessarily the case. There is an opportunity to discuss this. We have all issued press releases in which we tried to create the impression that we did this or that. There is collegiality when things happen and get done. The Electoral Commission has a huge body of work to do in this regard.

I have to do a refresher on our proportional representation system every time there is an election count. Aspects of it keep coming back to me. Many do not get it and do not have the time to learn. Therefore, the Electoral Commission has a great body of work to do in this regard, in addition to a great opportunity.

There was talk of six-seater constituencies. During the consideration of the electoral reform legislation, this matter was discussed. I would have much preferred six-seater constituencies. The Green Party would favour them. Many of the smaller parties, including the Labour Party, the Social Democrats and others, would favour them because they give smaller parties a better opportunity to win a seat. The lower the number of seats, the smaller the opportunity for the smaller parties.

If we want to bring about change, we should realise it rarely comes from the centre. It comes from the edges; it comes from the fringe and the smaller voices. I know that having been a member of a small party for over 20 years and having knocked on doors for 20 years to talk about the climate and the biodiversity crisis. The issues did not register with many but over the past five to ten years, or even the past three, there has been much more awareness and a much greater sense of urgency across all parties to act. The change did not come from the centre but from the edges, the smaller environmental groups and those groups that never gave up. It must give them some solace now to see the likes of the climate Act passed, but it must also disappoint them to hear some of the rhetoric and realise some people say one thing but act differently.

We cannot continuously increase the number of Deputies to have one per 30,000 people. At some point, we are going to have to make constitutional change to increase the limit to, say, 40,000. With many choosing to live in this country and with an ever-increasing population, we will face capacity constraints. Therefore, we have to address the constitutional matter and increase the limit. We cannot just keep increasing the number of Deputies.

An important part of the Electoral Reform Act on which the Electoral Commission will be working concerns the register. Having knocked on doors, register in one hand, we are all aware that there are often gaps in it. We have all met people who believed they were registered when they moved house and have encountered cases of people who appeared on the register in two places. Therefore, the commission has a vital role in getting the register right and drawing people in to register. I am aware that there is a Check the Register campaign. I urge everybody to push this. There is a simple QR code to bring you straight to the site. You can register online, which is a great advancement compared to what was in place beforehand, whereby you had to go to the Garda station with your form, get it stamped, etc. There is now an opportunity for 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register. This presents a fantastic opportunity to make younger people feel part of the system, even though they cannot yet vote at 16 and 17. Having pre-registered, they know they will be able to vote once they hit 18. We need to bring more young people into politics and we need to attract more people in to vote. I know there are those who say young people do not vote but I know many who are very engaged. It is unfair to characterise all young people as people who do not vote; they do and they do care and we need to pull them in at the earliest age possible.

Democracy is under attack in certain ways. Much disinformation is used in election campaigns and the Electoral Commission will be tasked with determining ways to ensure information circulated during an election campaign is valid and verifiable. I go to schools often and talk to students about various environmental and climate issues being worked on. I talk to them about where they source their information and ask them to check it. I ask them to check in a couple of locations. The Electoral Commission has an important body of work to do in this regard. We have seen elections throughout the world undermined, or allegedly undermined, by people who have interfered and tried to spread misinformation. People are very short on time and do not have much time to obtain in-depth information. They tend to take the high-level, headline-grabbing, flashy sort of imagery to be real. I do not know how we can overcome that. So much information comes at us these days that it is very hard to take the time to analyse what is real and what is not. This points to one of the most critical tasks of the electoral commission.

The issue of posters has arisen. I have always admired the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, for getting elected without using a poster. I wish I had the nerve to do that. I would love to have done it. I have often been critical of the number of posters. I had 248 posters put up for the general election, and of those I put up about 200 myself. A part of election campaigns I hate involves climbing ladders and using cable ties. We all know about this; we have all done it. It was kind of disheartening to be driving the roads of Wicklow trying to spot my own posters. Having put up 240 across the entire county, I saw that parties with a lot of money had put up thousands. We should level the playing field for everybody. I honestly believe that 250 posters is enough for anybody in a five-seater constituency. If we all had 250, each would stand out equally. It is sometimes bizarre to drive down the N11 and see the same four-times-lifesize face of a Deputy looking at me, telling me to give him my number-one vote. It does not work, or maybe it does – I do not know. What posters do is generate a sense of excitement and advertise that an election is happening. Therefore, I am not of a mind to completely ban them. I believe they have an important role to play, including for new candidates. We were all new candidates at one stage or another but the excessive use of posters needs to be curtailed. It is a huge waste of money. With access to social media and other means of getting a message out, we really need to get away from excessive postering.

I want to mention local government. I started in politics at local government level, as I assume many of us did, considering that not many make the leap straight into the Dáil without spending some time in local government. Local government is weak in Ireland. Our local authorities are very much underfunded by comparison with European counterparts. We must always be careful when comparing something in Ireland to something in Scandinavia, France or Germany, because they are very rarely without differences, but our local government is very much underfunded by comparison with that in Europe. Many of the decisions we make in this Chamber are about where we are going to spend the money or the budget allocations. It falls to local authorities to spend much of what is allocated on roads, social housing or other aspects of local government. It is where the rubber hits the road much of the time. If we want to encourage good local representation, we have to encourage people into a forum where they can make a difference and the desired changes – a forum that is well funded and has autonomy. With the enactment of the Local Government Reform Act 2014, we lost the town councils.

That was a backward step for democracy in this country. I would love to see the day when we reintroduce town councils, properly funded with good decision-making powers. With that decision-making power and proper funding comes responsibility. For that responsibility, we need to ensure the payment is good for people to go into that. We have much work to do in local government. We all expect the local government election, along with the European Parliament election, will be the next election but we never know. I hope the Electoral Commission will focus on how to get that information out there properly and work on the disinformation aspects of elections.

Deputy Connolly spoke earlier about today's EPA report on local authorities' environmental enforcement reporting. Not only do we need to make sure our local councillors are resourced, have powers and are well funded, we need to make sure the executives in our local councils, many of whom I have worked with for many years and most of whom I have found to be excellent, very committed to their work and frustrated by a system that probably does not move as quickly as they would want it to, have the autonomy to make decisions they want to want to make and to have the funding to do it.

I thank the Minister of State for bringing this Electoral (Amendment) Bill before the House. We waived pre-legislative scrutiny on it because the commission was independent and its set of recommendations were arrived at objectively. I do not particularly like what happened in my constituency but I accept it. In democracy there are the things we need to accept.

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