The electoral register should remain open for changes until the end of January, following claims that hundreds of thousands of inaccuracies remain, Fine Gael has demanded.
Fine Gael Louth TD Fergus O'Dowd said voters removed from the register, following the recent review ordered by the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, should be allowed the "maximum time" to get back onto the electoral register.
"There is little over a week until the deadline and, with reports of hundreds of thousands of inaccuracies, it is doubtful that this is sufficient time for the army of excluded eligible voters to get on the register," he said.
The Minister's "U-turn" last week in extending the deadline by a fortnight "was welcome but it was a case of too little, too late. Two weeks is not enough," said the Fine Gael spokesman on the environment.
The problems with the electoral register will be debated in the Dáil this week when the Minister moves an amendment in the Oireachtas to cover the fortnight's extension already offered.
Fine Gael has proposed that all citizens should be added to the register automatically when they turn 18.
Meanwhile, the Data Protection Commissioner has suggested that the Oireachtas should consider emergency legislation to ensure that local authorities can publish the names of people deleted from the register.
The issue arose after Dublin South County Council checked with data commissioner Billy Hawkes's office, following a request for that information for the Dublin South West constituency from the leader of the Labour Party, Pat Rabbitte.
In a letter to Mr Rabbitte, Mr Hawkes said he had not made a decision on the issue, but that he had offered advice to the local authority,although this advice may have been "misunderstood".
While there would be no problem supplying electronic copies of the old and the new register, he said privacy issues would arise if an individual had deliberately taken their name off the register.
However, local authorities had to decide whether some people left off the new register could subsequently claim that their rights under the Data Protection Act had been breached if a list of deletions were published.
"If I received such a complaint, I would be obliged to make a decision on it, a decision which I could see as being a difficult one in the circumstances," Mr Hawkes wrote to the Labour leader.
However, if the lack of a deletions list is causing "a serious challenge" to creating an accurate register, and if an acceptable solution could not be worked out, then "perhaps the best approach is for the Oireachtas to legislate".
"Such a specific legislative provision - which could perhaps be included in the promised emergency legislation to extend the deadline for updating the Register - would involve the Oireachtas in making a decision that the public interest in an accurate Register should override the potential impact on the individual's data protection rights," he wrote.
Replying to Mr Hawkes, Mr Rabbitte doubted if members of the public had the right under law to demand their names should not be published on electoral registers.
"I do not see that this assumption has any basis as a matter of history or, as a matter of current law, can be derived from an examination of the Constitution, electoral law or indeed data protection law," he said.
