Niall Blaney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I commend the Bill and the work that has gone into it heretofore. The establishment of an electoral commission under the Bill is monumental and overdue. Any democratic Government must aim to include as many people as possible in the electoral process and remove barriers to voting. There are also welcome changes to incentivise electoral boundary decision-making processes that will hopefully avoid cutting off people from voting for representatives in their own counties. I am particularly referring to my own county, among others. We have seen people cut off from voting for Donegal representatives in the southern part of the county. My hope is that whichever way the Donegal constituency is defined, whether it be a five or six-seater, or two or three-seater again, the boundaries must include all of Donegal in the electoral process and allow the people to vote for Donegal representatives. I ask the Minister to bear that in mind from today.

Since the Local Government Reform Act 2014, there has been a slow erosion of local representation through the abolition of town councils and the removal of powers from county councils and county councillors. Councils have since had to pick up the work left over from town councils and have fewer resources to work with. Councils have since been stretched thin and need support to enable them to support their communities to the highest standards. We have a good example of that in my home county. Letterkenny lost its town council and there was marriage with the Milford electoral division as well. The money is being sucked from the rural parts of the now-joined two electoral areas to keep Letterkenny town going. It is not right. It is not for today, but there is an issue there. Resources have to be looked at from that perspective.

Towns that previously had local councils have suffered the most from this decision, which has strained the electoral system to provide adequate representation. Unfortunately, the level of local representation that has been removed has not been replaced. This must be addressed in the future. I hope that having a centralised authority to tackle electoral issues will help bridge this representation gap and create space to discuss local representation going forward. Having an electoral boundary committee that will make the right choice for the people will go a long way in addressing this democratic deficit.

I also want to strongly commend this Bill on its aim to tackle interference in our elections. We are seeing foreign interference in elections and referendums in Ireland and across Europe taking place through political campaign financing and advertising on social media platforms. This Bill has a very welcome set of provisions to tackle the existing issues that we have already identified. The Bill also addresses the wider problems that have been seen in other European countries before they take root here. Foreign money has been supporting certain political campaigns in our country and this Bill goes a long way in putting a stop to that. We have seen great financial effort in social media advertising campaigns that aim to target people and influence their voting decisions. I support the idea that all political advertisers must be open about their goals, audience targeting and amount spent. The provisions here will add much needed transparency to a space that has so far been regulated by each platform according to its own standards. We must put public trust and security first, and I believe this Bill will do just that.

All in all, this legislation is far-reaching and will update our voting system from top to bottom. The Bill strives to modernise our democratic process and future-proof our elections. Removing barriers to voting has been long awaited.It is also crucial that social media campaigning is addressed before any irreversible damage is done to our electoral process as we have seen happen in other countries.

I strongly support this Bill and I hope the conversation will continue about local representation and the importance of having local and effective representation. Local democracy is very clean and has always been a very important part of our democracy down through the years. The role played by county councils and councillors is a very important one.

While the removal of the dual mandate probably needed to be done, there has been a deficit across all councils since that has happened that has never been properly looked into and dealt with. That is where that experience at Oireachtas level has been lost at council level and in council chambers. There needs to be something greater than just the few meetings a year with Oireachtas colleagues. There needs to be something there to make up that relationship because it is counties, particularly rural counties, that are losing infrastructurally as a result of that.