Seanad debates

Tuesday, 5 December 2006

Electoral (Amendment) Bill 2006: Committee and Remaining Stages

 

5:00 pm

Photo of Dick RocheDick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

The responsibility for the field work lies with the councils. I recognised that this was a huge task for councils, and I appreciate that councils are working very hard. For all the negatives one hears about local government, much good work is going on in the local government sector. I would not blame a small city council like Waterford for the names of 1,400 people who have died being on the register. It should not have happened. Incidentally, the Senator will be interested to know that Waterford city has the lowest proportion of registration to population over 18, at approximately 67%, whereas in other parts of the country it is 97%. We must come up with an explanation for that. It may be that people are living on the outskirts of the metropolitan area where there are issues about boundaries and so on.

I make the point to Senator Bannon that there is no automatic registration of people's addresses. If we did what Senator Bannon is proposing, we would create something equivalent to the automatic system of registration with one's local authority which applies in law in parts of the Continent. We would have to have a debate before we go in that direction. It is a different issue from the voting register. The voting register is a compilation of people who are over 18 collected in a particular area at a particular time. If we are to go the direction suggested by the Senator, we would have to have a different debate.

Senator Cummins made the point that the guidelines were universal. That was one of the strange findings I made when I decided I would tackle this long-running problem. Senator Cummins made a good point. When I raised the issue first and we began to have discussions about it, I discovered to my amazement that no common system was adopted from local authority to local authority. Over the years and through generations, each local authority went about it its own way. They went about their business because legally the responsibility of preparing the register lies with the councils and, quite correctly, the Ministers were not interfering with or micro-managing the work of any individual council, which would be wrong. One of the reasons for the anomalies, and there were different levels of registration from place to place, was that different principles and guidelines were put in place. We prepared a set of guidelines which the City and County Managers' Association and its representatives signed off on to ensure a common approach was taken for the first time to preparing the register.

Senator Cummins asked if there were two levels of visit. The answer is "yes". The specific instructions to the enumerators were that they were to take the register and check houses. If they found people were not at home, they were to put the written notices in the letter-boxes. If they could not track the people they were told they had to write a letter to those households. It is extraordinary that when we do something progressive in this country people fall on our heads because they do not take the time to listen to what was done. When people were crossed off the register previously, they did not get letters informing them of that. They will on this occasion.

What is unique now is that the councils have not just the staff to do the field work but the staff to do the back office work, which is the major part of compiling the register. They sent out 170,000 letters. Analysis of those letters, and analysis I have done also because I visited a few estates to check them out——

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