Feargal Quinn (Independent)

In respect of amendment No. 4, this is an important Committee Stage debate because ours is the only House which can revise the Bill at this stage and I hope all sides will face up to that challenge. I hope Opposition contributions are constructive and that the Government will consider and accept amendments no matter where they come from.

The aim of my amendments to help achieve the best possible electronic voting system. My first amendment has two purposes, the first of which is to facilitate the operation of those parts of the Bill which need to be brought into effect immediately. The Minister stressed the urgency of these provisions and the fact that the Bill needs to be passed by the Oireachtas before Thursday of this week if it is to be in operation in time for the elections next month. As currently worded, following enactment, it will be necessary for the Minister to make an order bringing these urgent provisions into effect. It seems much more efficient to bypass the necessity of a commencement order by simply providing for those parts of the Bill to come into operation immediately on enactment. Providing for commencement orders holds up the operation of the Bill while the sponsoring Department gets its act together on the implementation process. That is not necessary in this case. By accepting this amendment we can make the commencement order redundant in so far as the urgent provisions are concerned.

That is the technical aspect of the amendment, but the substantive part of the amendment has a rather different purpose. It provides that any commencement order applying to those provisions of the Bill which apply to electronic voting shall not come into effect until after such time as the Ceann Comhairle has received from the Commission on Electronic Voting a satisfactory certification of the proposed electronic voting system under the commission's terms of reference.

The Minister of State will probably be advised to say that such a provision is not necessary but after recent events it is surely unthinkable that any Government would try to proceed with electronic voting in the absence of an all-clear from the commission. That is what the Minister of State will say, because to do so would be arrogance of the highest order, even higher than we have seen on this subject in recent months.

While I agree that in practical terms this amendment is not strictly necessary — at least I hope not — it nevertheless has an important symbolic value that leads me to commend it to the House. Acceptance of the amendment will write into the Act an acknowledgement by the Government of the technical issues involved. In other words, a technical constraint will be put on the actions of any Government, not just this Administration, by providing it can act only on foot of the satisfactory certification of the proposed system by the independent commission. That recognises that no matter how desirable electronic voting may be in principle, we should not go forward with it unless we get the technical details right. Put another way, this takes judgment of whether a proposed voting system is acceptable in law out of the hands of Government and gives it to an independent commission which has been specifically constituted for this purpose. That is how it should be. That is the method we should have as with one stroke it removes any possibility of a repeat of the unsatisfactory scenario we witnessed in the past few months. The Government insisted over and over, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that the proposed system was utterly foolproof and that we should take its word for that. The preliminary report of the commission clearly showed how unwise it would be to take the Government's assurances at face value. If we had gone ahead on the basis originally planned a cloud of uncertainty would have hung over the voting system for all time. All Members would agree that that would have been very unsuitable, given the importance of public confidence in the democratic process.

I do not argue that this amendment is strictly necessary, but that it is highly desirable. If the Government accepted it, it would be a welcome signal that it believes the best way to move forward on this issue is by agreement and consensus, rather than on the belligerent confrontation of which we have seen too much in recent months. I commend the amendment to the House. It makes sense and it should be accepted.