Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

Ireland does not have such a system. It exists in some continental countries, at least in theory, but it does not apply here.

I would like to debunk the myth that some marvellous work was done in Northern Ireland and that it worked. When the work that was being done there encountered some very serious difficulties, tens of millions of pounds had to be invested in it. Hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Ireland were disenfranchised at the end of that process.

Senator Bannon made a final point about people who have submitted their forms since 1 November. Such people have been unable to use the automatic on-line system — www.checktheregister.ie — to track whether they are registered. The on-line system, including the registration system on the websites of individual local authorities, is based on the draft register, which was published on 1 November. There is no continuous tracking and updating. The draft register is not updated every day. There may be an argument for updating it every day, but such an approach would necessitate the use of a great deal of resources. I told the local authorities to use their resources to prepare the best register of electors we have ever had.

It seems to have been forgotten in this debate that over 370,000 people have been added to the register of electors since we started to review it. Such people had been disenfranchised because they were never on the register. There have been 507,000 deletions from the register, including 170,000 people who received written notice that they were about to be deleted because the local authorities could not track them. Tens of thousands of people who are dead were removed from the register. The local authorities cannot be blamed for the fact that they were on the register, because until this process was started they had no way of automatically tracking dead people. Local authority officials were doing their best in this regard, for example by tracking the death notices in local newspapers. It just did not work. When the officials in the city of Waterford undertook the review process, they discovered that 1,400 dead people were on the register.