Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the news that last week the Cabinet agreed to draft an election reform Bill that would provide for the establishment of a statutory independent electoral commission and, critically, the modernisation of the register of electors, which we can all agree needs to happen. An area I feel needs to be looked at, and I raised it in the previous Dáil with the then Minister with responsibility for local government, unfortunately to little avail, is the area of online voting - not electronic voting - and the necessity for a proper debate in the Houses to recognise that if we were bounced into an election in the next year, we would really have an issue with voting by way of pencil and paper at polling stations. One need only look at the five-hour queues for early voting in the United States at present.