Up-to-date, quality photographs will have to be provided by all candidates contesting next June's elections to the European Parliament.
For the first time Irish electors will be able to see a likeness of the person they vote for on the ballot paper. And the Department of the Environment is determined the photographs should be contemporaneous likenesses of high quality.
The possibility of including the photographs of candidates on ballot papers has been under review for some years, but the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, has now sanctioned their use for the European elections as a first step towards their introduction in national and local elections.
Including candidates' photographs on the ballot paper will help voters with reading difficulties in making their choice.
The cost of elections is expected to increase as a result of higher printing costs. The Department of the Environment has already sought quotations from printing companies for the new European Parliament ballot papers.
It costs the State about £4 million to hold an election. But next June's contests are expected to cost more because the European elections will be held in conjunction with the long-deferred local authority elections.
Some 80 per cent of the State's 1,600 county councillors have already applied for a retirement "golden-handshake" grant, offered to long-serving local authority members by the Minister for the Environment. But the percentage expected to eventually retire is much lower than that.
Party nomination conventions this autumn will force many councillors to make up their minds. But the final line-up will not be known until Independent councillors make their decisions known in the run-up to the closure of nomination next May.
A sitting councillor who contests the election but then loses the seat will not qualify for the "golden handshake".