Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister's openness to look at all these issues again. There is quite a difference between Cambridge Road, Rathmines, and Cambridge Analytica. Perhaps I am much more pedestrian in my focus but I am looking at it from that point of view.

There is now an explicit reference to a referendum commission carrying out a processing of political opinions. I would make one observation on that. It is a long-established phenomenon in politics that people lie in retrospect about what they did in elections and referenda when they are surveyed afterwards. John Kennedy scrapped home with a tiny margin when elected to office in America but as soon as the opinion polls were done shortly afterwards, the number of people who claimed to have voted for him suddenly shot up to 55% or 60% just like that.

The findings in several referenda in which the Referendum Commission here has published its post-referendum analysis are interesting. I noted, for instance, that the margin in the referendum to keep the Seanad suddenly shot up when people told the Referendum Commission the way they had voted, the implication being that people almost always like to be on a winning side.

I would put this marker down for various referendum commissions in the future: they should not rely too much on their opinion polls. People will say they were confused but these are people who are already deceiving them as to what they actually did. People have said that they found the ballot paper confusing. In many cases the percentage of people who told the Referendum Commission they voted differs widely from the percentage of people who turned out. We should not put too much credence on opinion polls. Future referendum commissions should be circumspect in their reliance on post-referendum opinion research because it is nearly always untrue and distorted by wishful thinking on the part of the people to whom they have spoken. I will not push my points any further and I will not delay on this matter. I am happy that we go out of Committee Stage if everybody else is agreeable.