Paschal Mooney (Fianna Fail)

-----Carlow-Kilkenny and Longford-Westmeath later became familiar combinations. This resulted in peculiar combinations such as Kerry West Limerick, Waterford East Tipperary, South Mayo South Roscommon, East Mayo Sligo and Leitrim North Roscommon, which gives me some fuel for a further debate on another amendment on the reasons why I think the Leitrim should become a single entity. However, I will focus on the amendment No. 3.

Mr. Coakley's report states two important elections took place on these boundaries. There was an election in 1921 to the House of Commons in southern Ireland, as it used to be referred to, which were regarded by Sinn Féin as part of the election of the second Dáil and in 1922 to the provisional Parliament of the Irish Free State which was similarly interpreted by the pro-treaty group as an election to the third Dáil. The next revision happened in 1934.

The Minister for Local Government, Seán T. O'Kelly, moved sharply away from the principles of the 1923 Act because the Electoral Act 1923 replaced this system with a set of 28 territorial constituencies ranging in size from three to nine members but returned to the county as the basic unit. I do not want to go into great detail about the history of various Governments and the electoral revision of constituencies Acts.

The work done by Seán T. Kelly reduced the average size, leaving only three constituencies with more than five members. There were only three, seven-seat constituencies from that point on. The change also fractured existing boundaries liberally. Some 27 of the 34 constituencies were based on micro-units such as district electoral divisions or, in the case of Dublin, what are referred to as "complex imaginary lines" running between named points. County boundaries were also widely breached.

I am suggesting that we should have a debate on whether we should have a constituency commission, with all of the resources, personnel and expensive that it involves. Others, such as Mr. Coakley, have suggested that a junior official, with all due respect to junior officials, in the Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government would have been able within half an hour to have carried out the relevant adjustments.

I can imagine the advisers from the Department are somewhat amused by my comments. I hasten to add that I am not casting any reflections whatsoever on any civil servant. Mr. Coakley put this view forward as a justification for his argument that it did not require a substantial architecture of resources to do what the commission will do, namely, redraw constituencies. It is important to put on the record the need to at least stimulate a debate in future. The evidence would suggest that the large complex architecture we set up every time there is a census may not be necessary. When we discuss a later amendment we will have the opportunity to debate how constituencies are arranged.

I fully support the view that there be an interim report. The reason we tabled this amendment is that if one looks back over recent commission reports, when it invited public submissions nobody was sure, other than the commission, what the submissions were and what people were saying. It was not until the final report was published that one saw the number of submissions and their content, which generated further debate and did not settle the issue. Following the constituency commission report there was another series of debates which took up several hours.

We have tabled an amendment suggesting that there be an interim report. It would allow the general public to have an idea of the thinking of people who make submissions. The commission would not be required to come to an interim conclusion. All it would be asked to do would be to put all the submissions received into the public domain. It would stimulate healthy debate that would be of assistance to the commission in making its final report.