John Ellis (Fianna Fail)

I accept that. However, the first thing that will happen is that the Minister will run into the Murphy judgment which states that the tolerance should be no more than 2.5%. This is part of the problem. Until we decide that we will be flexible with regard to the number of Members of the Lower House, we will have problems. Rural areas will see themselves as losing representation and the one thing people like to have is representation in the Dáil. My county has no chance under this. No party can elect a candidate because it does not have the physical numbers.

If we allow this to continue, a case can be made that people are being disenfranchised because they are. While they have the right to vote for somebody they do not have the right to vote for somebody from within their own area. Everything in this country is based on local government areas. Health boards were based on county council areas apart from the North Western Health Board which serviced part of west Cavan despite the fact that it was in the Eastern Health Board area. This was because hospital facilities were closer in Manorhamilton which was only five or six miles away than in Cavan town which was 40 miles away. These were minor changes.

The commission broke every term of reference it was given. I accept that from the Minister's point of view there is nothing he can do. All he could do, and I do not think anyone could expect him to do so, was to reject it. Perhaps when commission reports are prepared in future there is a need for the Houses to debate them prior to their being finalised and that tweaking would be allowed by both Houses. I know the Minister is considering this.

I have no doubt that the Opposition parties are equally as concerned about areas divided and sub-divided without any reason. We are all trying to establish the details of this commission report but we are not getting them. I tried under freedom of information and went up the line to the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government and the Ombudsman and the answer was "No". Because the commission report is handed in, all detail with regard to its work and preparation is supposed to be unavailable. It is totally wrong and unconstitutional that somebody can prepare a report and effectively disenfranchise people without giving a reason for so doing. This is where we are coming from. We are not coming from any other angle.

I could live with a Dáil of 146 Members if every county had the opportunity to elect somebody. I come from the county with the smallest population, which had this situation prior to 1981 and campaigns were fought for 20 years to change it. Until then it was a political decision and the Ministers of the day decided the boundaries. I look back and consider the representation in the early days of the State when, under the original Constitution, every 16,000 people had a representative in the Dáil. Some constituencies were made up of 12,000 or 14,000 people because of geographical or other problems.

I wonder how we will address this problem and not alone now, because I believe the only way to address it now may be through the legal route and I know the Minister will not make any comment on this and I do not want him to do so. Was the Attorney General's opinion sought on this? I sought legal opinion and was told that the documentation should have been made available and that if a case proceeded to court, the Minister and Secretary General who sat on the commission would be called as witnesses and would have to state their position.

There is an electoral Act which states that once it goes down, that is the end of it, but as far as the people I represented for 20 or more years are concerned, they want to see how they will have the opportunity to elect a Member of the Dáil again. Leitrim almost always had one representative from Fianna Fáil and one from Fine Gael in the old four-seater Sligo-Leitrim constituency. We might have been the smaller part of it but we had sufficient votes and they were managed reasonably well so that the people of Leitrim could elect two Members. On most occasions we elected two.

Now, we are heading into a situation where people will not be able to elect a Deputy from within their own county. The next census is due in 2011. Once the preliminary figures are available for this it will have to be reassessed and only a short period is available to make the report. However, it will be done on the preliminary figures. Everyone would be happy if this were the case and the Dáil were to run full term to 2012 because another revision would be done then. At present, people face the prospect of not being able to elect a Deputy for Leitrim. The members of the commission who made this decision should be made accountable, either to the Minister or the State at some level. We cannot allow circumstances to continue in which people make decisions without revealing the grounds on which they make them.

I could understand the decisions of the commission if there were only one place in which it broke county boundaries but its terms of reference state specifically that county and natural boundaries are to be adhered to, where possible. It is not as if this were impossible for the commission because it could have adhered to them. All the tweaking and turning it did in respect of counties Meath, Louth, Westmeath and Leitrim could easily have been dealt with by breaking county boundaries only once or twice. A portion of Louth could have been included with Monaghan, and Leitrim and Cavan could have been put together. Roscommon and Sligo could have been put together, creating a four-seater constituency without any problem. The commission had several options but chose to divide what it regarded as the weakest county, despite the fact that the chairman made it quite clear that he wanted to maintain Leitrim as an entity. We are not supposed to know that but, as with everything else, leaks emerge.

If the commission did not consider every option available, including increasing the number of Deputies from 166 to 168 or reducing the number to 164 – the figure can vary between 164 and 168 – it should have done so. It had the opportunity to operate within its terms of reference, yet it decided not to do so and it has disenfranchised the people of County Leitrim. That is putting it mildly. Whatever is necessary to get to the bottom of the decision must be done.

I accept fully that the Minister is not to blame. He received the report just like the rest of us. Had he interfered with the commission, there would have been continuous uproar. I know he is not happy with the report. His colleague, the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Deputy Sargent, has had his area cut in two, and Deputy Cuffe will be affected by the reduction in the number of seats in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown from five to four. We know of representatives affected throughout the country. Every part will be affected to some extent.

I cannot understand why the commission did not decide to operate within its terms of reference. It made its decision on Leitrim on the basis that it is a small county with only 30,000 inhabitants. In County Meath, Kells has been shoved to Meath East. To make up for doing so, the commission included a bit of Meath East with Louth. I do not know who the mathematicians were but they basically took a slide rule and made decisions on the basis that there should be no more than a certain population per Member.

Senator Hannigan probably welcomes the fact that he has been shoved into Louth.