John Ellis (Fianna Fail)

I may welcome this motion more than any other Member of this House because I have often raised this matter on the Order of Business. I welcome the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Deputy Trevor Sargent, and understand that the Minister left the House with good reason. I welcome the Minister's statement of intent regarding the electoral system.

I have a great bone of contention with the electoral boundary commission and the changes it has made. The commission sought submissions from the public and 75% of submissions sought Leitrim to be included in a constituency as an entire county. The commission seems to have been entirely opposed to the submissions it received and, to add insult to injury, it has refused a freedom of information request seeking the basis for its findings. It is wrong that a commission does not have to make available the documentation it consulted in taking a decision. The Minister is well aware that he must reply to FOI requests but, because a commission ends on the day it makes its report, I am told we will not receive an explanation for the decisions made. This is despite the fact that all of the documentation is still in the possession of the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. To add insult to injury, the officer who first refused the request was part of the commission's secretariat and this is totally wrong. I have written to the Ombudsman to see if anything can be done but I doubt it can.

An electoral commission with the independence and capabilities to deal with all electoral matters, including local government, Seanad, Dáil and presidential elections and referenda, is a great idea. At present elections are the responsibility of the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. There is a great deal of legislation deriving from various Acts that spread across many Departments and I believe it is time this became the responsibility of a single Department.

I also believe it is time to examine how constituencies are decided on. Senator Coffey said that county boundaries should be sacrosanct but it would take a constitutional amendment to achieve this. At the moment every challenge that comes before the courts relating to representation changes the field on what is tolerated as acceptable regarding constituency boundaries. This was part of the problem facing the members of the boundary commission; they claim their hands were tied and that the bind was strengthened by the judgment on the case last year involving Deputy Finian McGrath and former Deputy Catherine Murphy.

This House and the public must decide whether we want to widen the tolerance of what is acceptable. We must decide on whether we wish to increase the membership of the Dáil, because doing so is the only way this can be achieved. The alternative is to face the continual court challenges that have gone on for some years.

It is only fair that I should deal with my own county. I remember when Leitrim was divided between three constituencies: Donegal South-West, Sligo-Leitrim and Roscommon-Leitrim. It was that way for over 20 years until the 1981 election, when Leitrim was a single unit for the first time since the 1950s. This shows the type of representation the county has received, though I do not mean this as any reflection on the people who represented the county then or who represent it now. Leitrim has no Deputy in Dáil Éireann due to the gerrymandering it has experienced at the hands of the last two boundary commissions. The last one has guaranteed that nobody can be elected from the county to the Dáil.

In the Leitrim end of the old Roscommon-South Leitrim constituency, which was the one I fought on the last occasion, every vote cast was only 80% of a quota. That is an indication that people there feel they are being duped and that they can never have anybody to represent them. The new changes will mean it is nearly impossible to have anybody elected because of the division of the county into two greater parts. How do we explain to the people in Leitrim that they will never have a Deputy for the foreseeable future? Senator Coffey mentioned that parts of Waterford used to be in and out of Tipperary but I do not know what is the present position.

It is proposed that the recommendations of the new boundary commission report may be legislated for the next general election. Part of Offaly goes into Tipperary; west Limerick goes into Kerry; the constituency of the Minister of State, Deputy Sargent, is divided in two at Main Street in Swords. The constituency of Dublin North had been a natural accepted geographic area for many years. These are the issues that have to be discussed if anything is to be done.

An all-party committee of the House should be set up and given the same powers as any of the Oireachtas committees and asked to report within six months on the best way of ensuring people are represented. We all know about county loyalties. One has only to go to a Munster final, a Connaught final or any other GAA final to discover how strong are county boundaries. The River Shannon is a boundary for much of my county. Cortubber is just across the bridge in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Roscommon. If Roscommon is playing, the blue and saffron flags are displayed at Gings at the bridge and the green and gold flags are displayed at the other side of the bridge. County loyalties will always remain.

If something is to be done about county boundaries a root and branch approach will be required and it will need all-party consensus. Having listened to Senators Coffey and Kelly that consensus exists and having discussed the matter with people across the political spectrum, it is clear that people want county boundaries brought back and used as the marker for constituencies. There is a further reason for this in that many county operations, local authorities, health board regions, tourism boards and so on operate on a county boundary basis. It is time we decided to give it the respect it needs by ensuring that constituency boundaries are county based. It means there may have to be give and take in regard to the number of Dáil Members but I do not think anybody has a problem with that. The one thing the public want is representation and as near as possible to them.

Given the changes taking place in the population base, rural areas will be left without representation. One that is coming down the tracks is Mayo which will soon be a four seat constituency if the population of the east coast continues to grow. One can imagine what it is like trying to run a four seater constituency of the size of County Mayo.

At its last revision, if the boundary commission had not decided to protect two three seat constituencies between Kerry and Limerick, it would have meant that Leitrim would have been an entire constituency. Submissions were made to the boundary commission. It galls me that the report went against every proposal submitted by the public not only in Leitrim but throughout the country. Perhaps it is time this and the other House decided to set up an Oireachtas committee to deal with this issue and ensure legislation is introduced at the earliest possible date. It will not be ready for the Bill the Minister has proposed but it should be introduced to ensure that at the next general election, even if it means having a referendum, county boundaries become sacrosanct with regard to the electoral system.