I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time.
The Electoral Act, 1960, gave effect, with some minor modifications, to the recommendations in the first Interim Report of the Joint Committee on the Electoral Law. The present Bill has been prepared to implement generally the recommendations in the Second, Third and Final Reports of the Joint Committee, except those in regard to qualifications and disqualifications for membership of the Houses of the Oireachtas. These, together with the machinery for dealing with election petitions, will be the subject of further legislative proposals—in the not too distant future, I hope. While the Bill is based principally on the findings of the Joint Committee, the opportunity has been availed of to deal with a number of other points, not covered in the Joint Committee's Reports, in which amendment of legislation now in force seems to be necessary or desirable.
Deputies will have received with the Bill an explanatory memorandum which sets out in some detail the changes which the measure proposes to make in existing law. The Reports of the Joint Committee describe very fully the changes which that body recommended and the reasons underlying their recommendations. I do not propose, therefore, to present to the House at this stage a lengthy exposition of the various provisions of the Bill. Instead, I will advert briefly to some of its more striking proposals.
We have followed as closely as we could the Joint Committee's recommendation that the legislation to implement its proposals should repeal the previous statutes in full, avoid legislation by reference and be self-contained. This has made the Bill a long but, I hope, an intelligible document. Its length is further increased by the necessity of keeping the presidential, local elections and referenda codes in step with the Dáil code. Apart from the obvious desirability of doing this to avoid confusion on the part of candidates, returning officers, agents and the general public, the maintenance of uniformity between the different codes is important because of the special provision in Part VIII for the holding of different types of election on the same day.
The Bill, when enacted, will represent a very considerable reduction in the mass of legislation dealing with elections. Apart from the wholesale weeding out of the pre-1923 Acts, the number of post-1923 Acts dealing with the registration of electors and the conduct of Dáil elections will be reduced from twelve to four, including the present Bill. The other three Acts are the Electoral (Amendment) Act, 1933, which has a provision bearing on disqualifications for election to the Dáil inappropriate to this Bill, the Electoral Act, 1960, and the Electoral (Amendment) Act, 1961, dealing with constituencies. This reduction will make the task of consolidation, which was the Joint Committee's ultimate aim, very much easier.
The number of Acts dealing with the conduct of presidential elections and referenda will be reduced to the Presidential Elections Act, 1937, the Referendum Act, 1942, and the present Bill plus the applied provisions of the Prevention of Electoral Abuses Act, 1923. The law on the conduct of local elections will be contained in one set of regulations instead of being scattered, as at present, over more than a dozen different Acts, and a tangled mass of orders and regulations which only the expert can unravel.
In addition to eliminating the complexity and the deadwood, the Bill attempts to remove obsolete provisions from the electoral code. It has been framed in relation to the conditions and standards of our day. Where this approach so requires, there has been no hesitation about discarding provisions—some so long established that they appear to be an integral part of the scheme of elections—which serve only to complicate the process of registration and election.
The Constitution provides that:
Every citizen without distinction of sex who has reached the age of 21 years who is not disqualified by law and complies with the provisions of the law relating to the election of members of Dáil Éireann shall have the right to vote at an election for members of Dáil Éireann.
Section 5 in Part II of the Bill provides accordingly for the registration as Dáil electors of persons so qualified.
In the case of local elections, it is proposed to allow every person aged 21 years or more who normally resides or occupies property in the area of a local authority to be registered there as a local government elector, irrespective of whether or not he is an Irish citizen. At present a person who is not an Irish citizen can be registered as a local government elector only if he has occupied property in the area of a local authority for six months, or is the wife of such an occupier, and is a British subject. The number of non-citizens who will receive the local government franchise as a result of the proposal will be small, but considerable simplifications in registration procedures will result from the change,
The old provision for disfranchisement of persons as part of the penalty for certain electoral offences—which does not, I am afraid, hold for anybody the terrors it may once have had—will be abolished by a number of repeals in the First Schedule and instead the more tangible penalty of heavier fines or longer imprisonment will be provided. Some rationalisation of procedures will result.
With the abolition of the provision for the registration of Dáil electors where they occupied business premises, which served only to complicate registration without any compensating advantage, every person over 21— apart from soldiers, certain inmates or patients in hospitals, county homes and prisons—will be registered where he was ordinarily resident on the qualifying date. If he is a non-citizen he will be registered only as a local government elector. Electors who occupy for the qualifying period, other property in addition to their residences will, also be registered as local government electors in respect of that property, if they are not already so registered in the local authority area where the property is situated. The object of this proviso is to ensure that nobody is registered more than once as a local government elector in the area of a local authority.
Section 5 of the Bill provides that for registration purposes an elector's age is to be taken as his age on a date to be specified in regulations. The intention is to specify the date on which the register of electors is published or comes into operation, thus continuing the arrangement, made under the Electoral Act, 1960, which allows eligible persons reaching the age of 21 by that date to be included in the Register.
At present, the work of preparing the register of electors and jurors lists is shared between officers of local authorities, for most of whose functions I am the appropriate Minister, and county registrars, for most of whose functions the Minister for Justice is the appropriate Minister. This divided responsibility, at both local and central levels, as might be expected, is not satisfactory and the Joint Committee considered that registration work could, with advantage, be brought within the ambit of the one authority, subject to one Minister. The Committee accordingly recommended that the work should be transferred entirely to local authorities whose members are elected by those registered in the register and who can, therefore, be presumed to have a direct interest in its compilation. To safeguard the rights of electors, the Committee further recommended that county registrars should adjudicate on claims for and objections to the inclusion of names in the register. Effect is being given at Section 7 to these recommendations. The concentration of registration work under one roof will enable some further rationalisation of procedures to be effected and the greater resources of local authorities, both in staff and equipment, should be of particular benefit.
As another step towards rationalising registration, the complicated arrangements for dividing costs between the State and local authorities will be replaced by a straightforward 50-50 sharing of expenses. A saving to local authorities, estimated on the basis of figures for a recent year, to total about £10,000 annually will result.
Part III of the Bill, which deals with the conduct and costs of Dáil elections should, I think, be welcomed by the electorate, by returning officers and staffs and by candidates at elections. The requirement, dating back to the Ballot Act, 1872, obliging a candidate to obtain the sponsorship of ten electors causes unnecessary trouble and inconvenience alike to the candidates, to sponsors and to returning officers. This is now being discarded and in future a candidate can nominate himself or can be nominated by any elector in the constituency for which he proposes to stand. Severe penalties are proposed for nominating a candidate without his consent and, together with the £100 deposit, these should ensure that there is no abuse of the new and simpler nominations procedure. It is also proposed to require the returning officer to give a decision on a nomination paper within an hour after it is handed to him instead of waiting, possibly for days, until the time arrives for the ruling on nominations.
Returning officers are not a court of law and cannot judge whether a person is qualified or disqualified for election. They have, in fact, not tried to exercise this sort of jurisdiction. The Bill will put the present practice on a clear statutory basis.
To discourage the nomination of persons who are not qualified, nomination papers may contain a brief summary of the principal qualifications and disqualifications for election and a candidate or his proposer may be required to subscribe a declaration that he has read this statement and believes the candidate to be qualified. There will be penalties for false declarations.
Particulars of candidates' political affiliations will appear on the nomination papers and will be included on the ballot papers. Voters will thus be in a better position to identify the persons for whom they intend to vote.
Another proposal which I feel will be generally commended is that for the elimination of the pink tendered ballot papers given to voters who have been personated. Although only a hundred or so of these papers are used at a general election, thousands of them must be printed and distributed to presiding officers. They are not counted except in the event of a petition. The new arrangements will cut out this waste of printing and will provide for the inclusion of the tendered ballot paper in the count.
The elimination of practically all provisions for oaths or affirmations in connection with polling is a further streamlining of procedures. The penalties for voting in another person's name, or voting twice, or for a candidate or the agent of a candidate acting as a companion to a blind or incapacitated voter will, of course, remain.
Perhaps the most striking change which is being made under Part VII of and the First Schedule to the Bill is the abolition of the limitations on the amount of the expenditure which a candidate may incur or the number of persons he may employ in furthering his candidature at a Dáil election. These limitations originated a century ago when the electorate was much smaller than at present. The Joint Committee felt, and I am in complete accord with their view, that the assumptions on which the limitations were based are no longer valid. The limitations are at present admittedly ineffective and to try to make them effective, even if anybody thought that desirable, would require the most elaborate and far-reaching controls. The Bill, therefore, proposes to abolish them.
The changes made in the Dáil code will be incorporated, where appropriate, in the law relating to presidential and local elections and to referenda. A new proposal included in the presidential elections code is that for a special tribunal to consider objections at nominations other than objections to the form of the nomination paper.
Part VI of the Bill sets out to codify and modernise the law relating to local elections. It is visualised at Section 85 that local elections will be held on the same day throughout the country. The present system under which different days between 23rd June and 1st July, inclusive, are fixed by different authorities has led to a dispersal of interest. If one polling day was fixed for the whole country the publicity given to local elections would be more concentrated and would lead to a greater public interest in the elections and possibly to a higher poll. Greater public awareness of local elections should be prompted also by the power to be given to local authorities by section 84 to issue polling cards.
Deputies will have noted the intention to require a candidate at a local election to lodge a deposit. This move will tend to curb a form of abuse which has manifested itself at some local elections. Candidates have stood for election who could have no reasonable hope of being elected; such contests involve the electorate and ratepayers in inconvenience and expense and should be eliminated by the introduction of deposits, sufficiently large to deter irresponsible nominations but not large enough to prevent the candidature of anyone who sincerely believes that he has a prospect of being elected. Of course, if his belief is justified in the eyes of the electorate, he will get his deposit back.
I feel it would be ungracious of me to conclude without paying tribute once again to the splendid work which was carried out by the Joint Committee on the Electoral Law. Our task in preparing the present measure for your consideration was immensely facilitated by their deliberations, extending over more than a year during which they examined in detail all aspects of the franchise and registration of electors, the conduct and costs of Dáil elections and the expenses falling on candidates at these elections. In years to come, their reports will undoubtedly be regarded as a milestone in the development of the Irish electoral law. I trust that the House will indicate their appreciation of the work of the Joint Committee in the most evident manner — by accepting this Bill in principle.
