Dick Roche (Wicklow, Fianna Fail)

Senator O'Rourke made the point well. When the register was being drafted previously and the field worker took the view that the person was not there and should not be eligible for the register, the person was struck off and no written notice was given. This time we gave councils the resources to recruit additional field personnel, and I specified that the councils should recruit the census enumerators as they had been around the houses and they knew different areas very well. Previously, people got no notice and they would only know that they were off the register when politicians knocked on their door when canvassing.

I had two complaints about field workers during this process. One was from a lady who called me when the Mayo versus Dublin football match was being played. She was incensed because an enumerator had just called to her house trying to check the voting register, which shows that great effort went into this.

We have a terrible habit in this country of long-fingering everything and not doing anything. We do things badly because of that. Deadlines mean nothing and we wait until the last minute to do anything. At the joint committee meeting on this, I said on several occasions that if I received any request from a local authority for an extension of time, I would look on it sympathetically. I do not want to put the gun to the head of any local authority. At the eleventh hour, I got three separate requests from councils for time extensions and I said I would grant them.

However, our electoral law is not very prudently drafted. The exact dates are specified in law, which gives a degree of inflexibility. I had said to the committee that I would grant a request if I got one. Rather than granting the requests only for the three councils involved, I granted it for every council. That is why my amendment was introduced, namely, to give everybody the additional chance.

I do not believe that there is any benefit in putting the date back from 9 December to 20 December. A number of years ago, the voting register process was brought forward so that it would not coincide with the Christmas period. Very few people would be thinking about the voting register on 20 December. Any of those 170,000 people who have got written notices will have made their submissions back to the councils if they are really interested. I do not believe that there will be many people five days before Christmas suddenly deciding they should quickly submit forms to the council office. It is a reasonable enough ploy for the Opposition to put forward, but it does not have practical benefit.

There is one good reason why we should not do this. We know that the current voting register was compiled in November 2005. The current register for 2005-06 was compiled over 12 months ago. To leave us in a position where that is the only extant register, beyond 15 February, would be an act of political irresponsibility. I am not anticipating a general election between 15 February and 15 March. However, it would be politically irresponsible to create a situation where we know the best part of 500,000 names have to be deleted and that some 400,000 people who should be on the register are not. That is a total of 900,000 deletions or errors. If we were to allow that to continue, it would be wrong. There is no practical benefit in extending this further.

The Senator is concerned about the back office process such as the work of the councils. The councils will have until 2 January to do the back office work. It will not be a big deal to sign off on this since everything is on computers these days. The register will then transmit to the county registers who will have access to the electoral court, as it is called.