A RADICAL reform of election arrangements, including the introduction of fixed boundary Dáil constituencies, is one of the options favoured in a report commissioned by Minister for the Environment John Gormley, which will be published shortly.
The study conducted by some of Ireland’s leading political scientists suggests that the new system would end “the contentious issue of regular breaching of county boundaries”.
The report is the first step towards the establishment of an electoral commission, to oversee all aspects of Irish elections, as promised in the programme for government.
It recommends that the electoral commission should take over responsibility for the electoral register, the registration of political parties, the administration of elections from nominations to the final result and the setting of constituency boundaries.
It also recommends that the commission should take over responsibility for monitoring party and election funding, currently the respon-sibility of the Standards in Public Office Commission. The report suggests the commission should be chaired by a judge or former judge of the Supreme Court or High Court and should have four other members, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Ombudsman, and the clerks of the Dáil and Seanad.
The most sweeping change raised is the option of bringing Ireland into line with other countries that use proportional representation by having a fixed number of constituencies in which the number of seats per constituency would change in line with changes in population.
The authors say that this would be both more and less demanding than the current system of constant constituency revisions after each census.
“It is more demanding in that public and elite opinion has come to accept apparently uncritically the view that in this respect Ireland should follow the British model, rather than the continental European one which proportional representation and multi-member constituencies suggest.
“Since this option would also imply an end to the limit of five on the number of deputies per constituency, it would not be particularly attractive to large parties, which tend to win a disproportionate number of seats in small constituencies,” the report says.
It adds that under such a system the commission would do little more than preside over the reallocation of seats between constituencies after each census.
“A new electoral commission might thus easily supervise seat reapportionment along these lines, and this role might also be extended to cover European and local elections,” says the report.
Following the publication of the report this week, Mr Gormley intends to initiate a consultation process involving all the political parties and interest groups before a major piece of legislation on the issue is published.
The report was produced for the department by UCD political scientists John Coakley, Richard Sinnott, John O’Dowd and James McBride.
