New methods for conduct of referendums planned

The Government is preparing new legislation for the conduct of referendum campaigns in the wake of the Cabinet confidentiality fiasco last October.

The new proposals will be published alongside the White Paper on the Amsterdam Treaty in late January.

Government sources confirmed that it is planned to establish a statutory commission to regulate the Amsterdam Treaty campaign in line with the McKenna judgment on the divorce referendum last year.

The decision to formulate a new way of running referendum campaigns has arisen because the Government accepts that large numbers of the public were uninformed about the issues involved in the proposal to amend the rule on Cabinet confidentiality on October 30th.

An ad hoc commission was charged with the task in that referendum of employing barristers to formulate advertisements giving the arguments for and against.

The nature of the information imparted in these advertisements came in for much criticism from Opposition parties and members of the public at the time.

To establish a new modus operandi for the conduct of referendums in the future, the Government has decided to bring in legislation to establish a referendum commission on a permanent footing with an active mandate to impart information about the pros and cons of any change in the Constitution.

The details are being prepared by the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, and will be published next month.

One of the proposals now being considered by the Government is that it would ask the new commission to plan public events, rather than just advertisements, to inform the public of constitutional issues.

It is also understood that the commission may be charged with the task of allocating taxpayers' money equally to both sides of a referendum issue, rather than financing the lobby groups on either side.