Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien. I thank Senator Fitzpatrick and others in the party and, indeed, Senator Cummins, the Ministers of State, Deputy Peter Burke and Noonan, for their work on this.

It is important that we deal with the electoral process like this and the setting up of An Coimisiún Toghcháin will be a major step forward in the protection of the democracy in the State. We heard much talk here about outside influences and money. I would like the younger generation to realise how hard people fought for our democracy and how easily it now could be influenced by influences outside, which have no great desire to help the State but to use it in a way that would not do us any good.

We must move with the times and we must acknowledge and realise that many democracies are now under attack. Here we must be transparent in what we do. There is no doubt about what is proposed in this Bill. It will be transparent. It will be good. Once people start to focus on this, they will be quite appreciative of what we politicians are trying to do.

I welcome that we will be looking at the extension of postal voter categories. I also would say - it is something that was brought up here by somebody and might be only a smaller point in the overall discussion - that sometimes when people are caught abroad on holiday and suddenly an election is called and they cannot vote, they get extremely annoyed and upset. There are people who go abroad for work or whatever reasons who can be covered for a vote, but there are categories that are not covered. It is something I would like looked at because many people will come to me stating that they had holidays planned, they like to vote every time and they cannot vote because they will be gone out of the country for the election.

On the electoral register, I do not know if I would agree with one particular local authority having the overall say. There is much to be benefited from each local authority doing the registers but people move around a great deal nowadays and it is difficult to keep a check on people. We must reform it but rather than having one local authority overseeing the whole lot, it should be done through each local authority.

The boundary commission is not exactly what we are discussing here today but one would wonder at times how it makes decisions. For my constituency of Roscommon-Galway, on the last occasion they decided to move 7,500 votes out of north Roscommon into Sligo-Leitrim-South Donegal. They had done it with Cavan previously - they put them in with Sligo-Leitrim-South Donegal - and the Cavan people were not long saying that they had to get that changed. Certainly, in a Roscommon context, we want our county intact. It is something that we will be looking at in the future. I suppose the commission has decisions to make but one would wonder sometimes how it works it out that way. They will see us as population numbers and so many people per TD. They work out from an existing system but this is something we should further reform as well.