Victor Boyhan (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy English, here and thank him for coming to the House.

This Commencement matter is on the plans to reform and maintain the electoral register. I was reminded again why I brought this issue up by the very low turnout in the recent by-elections. I spoke to a number of candidates who could tell me that people were five, ten or 15 years on the register of electors. We have a very bad system in place. It does not serve democracy and politics well that we have such an archaic system. I was also reminded of the fact that on Thursday, 22 September we had an opening statement by the Minister of State, Deputy Phelan, in which he set out all of his ideas and reforms and told us that we were going to have legislation on the electoral commission. A memorandum was presented to us and it talked about independence, membership, accountability, the streamlining of the electoral registers, there was a regulatory analysis done on this Bill, and finally we had the Standards in Public Office Commission, SIPO, expressing serious concerns on the whole electoral process.

There are challenges. SIPO called for the electoral commission in respect of legislation to deal with digital political campaigning. It talks in its recent report about the influence outside of this State and stated that the unregulated nature of social media campaigns, and I am quoting SIPO directly here, "allows for foreign actors to influence Irish elections and referendums, with potentially significant consequences". We have serious issues in this regard.

The last time I made some inquiries into the franchise section, there were between eight and ten people working in that section in the Custom House, who effectively run the elections and the referendums. That is a great pressure on them, albeit they do a good job. The time has come where we need a proper, structured and independent oversight of how we conduct our elections, how we manage and deal with SIPO and financial returns and all of these issues. The body politic has received a lot of blows recently and it is time we put in place the necessary legislation and Bill for the governance of any election or referendum in the State. More importantly, the key issue is what are the Minister of State's plans to clean up, smarten up and have an up-to-date and fit-for-purpose register of electors in this country?