Dominic Hannigan (Labour)

We all respect the work of the commission. However, we wish to know more about the rationale involved. There should be more transparency, which is the topic of the month in the Houses at present. The publication of the rationale would help and go some way in this regard. I welcome the fact there will be a review of the management of the electoral register and I welcome also the potential of having a rolling electoral register. I am a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, which has spent quite some time in the past year and a half examining how best to improve the electoral register.

During the previous general election in 2007 I remember calling to a house in which 17 people were registered to vote but which had only two residents. I called to four houses which between them had 51 votes yet only eight people lived there. The local authorities were clearly unable to manage the electoral register because of the sheer scale of the resources required to keep an up-to-date register and because so many people were moving in and out of the area. I was heartened to see the report published by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on the Environment, Heritage and Local Government on which the Minister of State's Department is acting, suggesting that we move towards a rolling system. That will increase transparency and mean that the register is more up to date and reflects the population in our towns and villages. I am sad that it will not be in place for the local elections on 5 June but this is a way forward. I am grateful for the work the Department is doing in this area of electoral reform and compliment the Minister and Ministers of State involved.

I look forward to seeing a rolling register in place as soon as possible, as long as it is adequately funded. The Minister of State will have to fight to ensure that the new authority responsible for the register is adequately funded and does not suffer from cutbacks. A hell of a lot of data will have to be carefully managed. There have been problems around confidential data, for example, the Bank of Ireland lost the details of hundreds of thousands of customers last year. We need to be sure that those in charge of maintaining and updating the electoral register are given sufficient resources to do the job well and accurately, and most important, to ensure that data is confidential.