Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

They stated that the occupant had until 9 December to contact the council indicating he or she was off the register. Those letters went out in early November. The response to those letters has been huge; replies to 20% to 30% of them are being received. That does not mean the remainder are disenfranchised. Some of the remainder of those 170,000 are people who have changed address. I did an analysis of a number of estates in Arklow, a town that has not experienced a great deal of change until relatively recently, and the field work was uncannily accurate because the field workers were able to trace people who had changed address. These people's names at their old addresses were removed from the register but prior to that being done, the field workers followed the guidelines correctly. They wrote to inform the elector, say, Joe Bloggs at No. 6, XYZ Street, that he would be taken off the register. The fact that Joe or Josephine Bloggs is now living up the road in a new estate means that he or she is properly registered.

There is no simple way of compiling the register properly other than field work. We do not have a system of automatically tracking every citizen through his or her entire life. I have changed my address more than a dozen times and there is no way of automatically recording a change of address on the register. I had an interesting experience recently in tracing prize bonds I bought when I was 21. I had to think back to where I was living when I was 21.