Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I do not want to say too much. We had a thorough debate yesterday on the electronic voting aspect of this election. It is a pity the Government insists on saying that everybody who criticises what it is doing is an opponent of electronic voting. I am quite the opposite. I am also computer literate, and I am sure many Members are as computer literate as me. The one thing I know is that computers fail just as biros fail and cars break down. I am an engineer and one of the things about which I have learned to be sceptical is any assurance based on an absolute assurance. There was a time when we were told nuclear power stations could not go wrong, but we found out differently. The banks spent years telling us ATMs could not make mistakes. It took huge efforts by courageous individuals in this country and in the United Kingdom to illustrate that fact. The banks were happy to libel people and to say they were lying when they said the money they were supposed to have taken out was different from the money actually taken out.

We are in an extraordinarily difficult situation when there is a fundamental change in the system of the counting of votes being imposed by a Government which is unwilling to take the steps necessary to reassure the Opposition parties. It is quite extraordinary and the Government should think about it because it is creating dangerous precedents about the fundamental ways we do our business. It can still do something about it. Questions have been asked but it has not answered them. They are questions which make sense to anybody who knows more about computing than just switching a computer on and off. Issues which arise include power failures and the back ups for power failures and whether they work. There is a series of questions which I do not have to be a computer genius to recognise because we have all run into problems. I use computer software all the time which people would say is foolproof, but it goes wrong. I use computers which we are told are foolproof, but they go wrong. We need to know why all of the concerns about electronic voting will not be addressed. I am tired of people saying I am to trust them because they know what they are doing.

I have often spoken in this House about a favoured phrase of mine — the tyranny of experts. The late Lieutenant General M. J. Costello said to so-called experts that if they could not explain something to him — he was a reasonably intelligent man — they were not experts. Experts can explain what is going on. A succession of questions have been asked about the system which people cannot or will not answer. I must question the expertise of the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and his Department in light of the circumstances in which I received, as I did last week, the revised register for part of the constituency in which I live. The register was accompanied by a letter from my county council informing me that I must fill in two forms if I want to make changes and clipped to this was a thin slip stating that the Department had not supplied the council with the necessary forms and these would be forwarded to me once they had been received. Why should I believe that a Department, which is unable to issue to county councils the statutorily required form enabling one to seek changes to the electoral register on time, has available to it sufficient internal or external expertise to allow the rest of us to have confidence in its ability to do a good job?

I am not a Luddite. On the contrary, I believe we are still profoundly primitive in terms of much of what we insist on doing by paper. We could extend electronic systems to many more areas and are not nearly as far advanced as we pretend to be. How could we be given the current level of broadband penetration? We are extraordinarily slow in using electronic means in areas where their use becomes feasible. For years, I have observed Senator Quinn trying to persuade Departments to accept electronic publication of documents.

Despite being so slow in this regard, I am expected to accept this sudden leap. Those of us who argue for a pause because we need to be reassured that the system is reliable and not capable of manipulation or error are told we are Luddites. The opposite is true in my case — I like technology, use it and approve of its extensive introduction. With regard to electronic voting this is not the issue. The issue is trust and the reason I do not have absolute trust in technology is that such certainty is not possible. Incinerators and computers break down and as a member of an opposition party, I am entitled to participate in a process which creates trust. This is the problem.

I am rarely approached by constituents in the National University of Ireland but I have been approached by technically qualified people who are extremely suspicious of the introduction of electronic voting. I am not suspicious and do not attribute malicious motives to its introduction. My belief is that the Minister is in a hurry to prove he is high-tech and has, therefore, decided to ignore the Luddites. This is a fundamentally wrong political decision. The people who approached me, who know far more about this issue than I do, have voiced suspicions about electronic voting and distrust its introduction. I echo their view that its introduction is wrong.

I have done some quick sums on the dual mandate. I am my party's candidate in Ireland South, a peculiar constituency which covers Munster with the exception of County Clare, which is a strange contradiction but one with which we will have to live.