Jerry Buttimer (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is very welcome to the House. I thank him and the Minister of State, Deputy Burke, for the work they have done and I pay tribute to Senator Cummins for his outstanding work on the committee. I also pay tribute to the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, for his stewardship of the Bill. To be fair to all of the Ministers and the Department, there has been accessibility and a willingness to debate. I also thank the departmental officials.

This is significant legislation that will change our electoral system forever. It is one that many of us welcome, whether it is to register to vote, the register of electors, the maintenance of the political register, or the now very apt online regulation of political advertising.

All of us who are practitioners of politics will welcome an electoral commission. It will be impartial, independent and will have oversight of our electoral system, but I have a difficulty. I do not mean this to be offensive but we need to put politicians who are either retired or local or non-general election candidates on the electoral commission. We have judges and civil servants, and I will not name names, who are presiding and will be part of this commission. While I am not questioning their competence, they have never run for election. In the main, they may not be involved in the political system at all, and the book and the theory, as the Minister knows quite well, are different from the reality. The proof of it is the electoral boundary review. Time after time we are told after every census we will have an independent electoral boundary review committee. We pick the Clerk of the Seanad, the Clerk of the Dáil, a judge here and whoever else to be on it. Time and again they have decimated communities by drawing an arbitrary line, taking road A and road B, putting them in two different constituencies and disempowering people. That cannot continue. I appreciate we have come a long way from the gerrymander, and I am old enough to remember the last infamous one, which backfired badly on the then Minister, whom I will not name in the House, but the Minister here knows who I mean and what year it was. I very much hope the electoral commission will work in respect of the political boundary review and will not disempower and disenfranchise communities.

I also very much welcome the independence of the electoral commission. Looking at what is happening in America, and the Cathaoirleach is very familiar with this, it is extraordinary that the secretary of state in the state of Georgia or Arizona, for example, can receive a phone call from the President of America looking to find 11,000 votes allegedly to change the outcome of the state's election.That is bad and unhealthy for democracy and bordering on corruption. Therefore, I welcome integrity and independence.

Democracy costs money. To have our democracy free and fair, I believe, requires State funding and State involvement in the funding of political parties. I am unapologetic about that. It sickens me to see people in America running for election raising millions of dollars at state, local and national levels to run a political campaign. I hope that we can always have that transparency in our electoral system because if we lose that it will be back to the bad old days where none of us wants to go. I hope that the electoral commission will be able to keep that at its core because we must fund democracy. We must not be worried about what the commentariat will say about the funding of democracy.

Senator Kyne made a good point about opinion polls. My time is nearly up but I will come back to it on Committee Stage, as I will to other issues.

I sincerely thank the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, and his team in the Department for this Bill, which is long overdue. It is an important piece of legislation that I hope we will all support. I look forward to having further discussion on Committee and Report Stages.