Phil Hogan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fine Gael)

The Electoral (Amendment) (No.2) Bill is a short but important Bill to enable the electoral register to be used for selecting citizens for the constitutional convention. When consideration was being given to the establishment of the convention, the Government decided there should be 100 members, of which 66 would be ordinary citizens. As set out in the resolution made in the House earlier today, membership of the convention will consist of 66 citizens entitled to vote at a referendum, randomly selected so as to be broadly representative of Irish society.

Section 13A of the Electoral Act 1992, inserted by section 4 of the Electoral (Amendment) Act 2001, provides that it is an offence to use information in the register of electors other than for electoral or other statutory purposes. Such a statutory purpose is provided, for example, in the Juries Act, for the selection of members of juries. An edited register is in place, which may be used for any purpose. That register includes approximately 300,000 voters who have opted to have their names included on it. However, that is a relatively small percentage of the total electorate, which stood at 3.144 million for the referendum last May. Clearly, therefore, the edited register would not be adequate for this purpose.

The constitutional convention is not established by statute and it is necessary, therefore, to provide in the electoral acts for the use of information in the register in the selection of citizen members of the convention. A polling company will be engaged to select the 66 people, who are on the electoral register and are representative of the population generally, in terms of gender, age, social class and region. The selection process will be overseen by the independent chairperson of the convention.

Section 1 of the Bill amends section 13A of the Electoral Act 1992 by inserting a new subsection. This will provide that information in the electoral register may be used for the purpose of selecting citizens of Ireland to participate in the constitutional convention. Section 2 of the Bill contains standard provisions dealing with the Title, citation and construction of the Bill.

As I said earlier, the sole purpose of the Bill is to provide in statute for the use of the electoral register for the first time in selecting people for the purpose of the convention. It is a Bill to facilitate an important operational aspect of establishing the convention and I commend the Bill to the House.