Jillian van Turnhout (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House and thank him for taking this Private Members' business.

When my colleague, Senator Mac Conghail, said he had selected this issue for his Private Members' time my first thought was that everybody agrees we should have an electoral commission. That goal is stated in the programme for Government and it has been reiterated in the statement of Government priorities but we still do not have an electoral commission and, therefore, it is essential that we debate this issue today. Given that it has been committed to and, as Senator Mac Conghail has said, a report on the subject was carried out in 2008 entitled a Preliminary Study on the Establishment of an Electoral Commission in Ireland. The recommendations exist, the groundwork has been done and we want to see it established.

The issue of keen importance to me and a key function of the electoral commission will be the reform of the electoral registration system. It would, in particular, ensure that the vast majority of young people are registered to vote. We all know that one cannot vote unless one is registered to do so. What is less well known is that a large number of young people are not on the electoral register. In 1999 I was president of the National Youth Council of Ireland and we published a report called Voting at the Crossroads which found that 14% of 18 to 25-year olds were not registered to vote.