In the course of the Minister's statement he refers to the court judgment, a very excellent summary of the law and determination of the provisions of the Constitution as they affect the election of Deputies to this House. The Minister says that the judgment would suggest that a deviation of up to 1,000 would be acceptable. I should like to know where he gets that from. I should like the Minister to tell us where did Mr. Justice Budd say that a deviation of 1,000 would be acceptable? I do not see it in the court judgment. It is a deduction he makes for his own use and benefit and it is a specious deduction. There is no definite statement by Mr. Justice Budd that it would be legally right to deviate by 1,000 from the national average, either above or below. The Minister for his own purposes has tried to create the impression that this, in fact, was said by Mr. Justice Budd and the upshot of that process of specious argument is that the people of the city and county of Dublin have to pay a far higher price in terms of votes for Dáil representation than the people in the rest of the country. I am probably one of a very small minority giving voice to this view because the majority of Members represent constituencies outside Dublin. I can only appeal to their sense of equity and fair play in regard to this matter.
Mr. Justice Budd also said that he presumed the words "democratic State" tended to convey a State in which all the people were deemed to have equal rights and privileges. I hope we have not gone to such an extreme of cynicism and self-interest that the only thing that concerns Members is the effect of changes of this kind upon our own immediate position as Dáil Deputies, and nothing else. I recognise full well that it is natural that the primary interest to any Member of the House must be how changes of this nature will affect his own personal position. That, however, cannot be the major consideration which surely must be that if we are ever to regard ourselves seriously as a national legislature the major consideration must be the overall national good. If we permit a Government such as this to produce legislation obviously designed to discriminate against one section of the public to go without protest we are not doing the job with which we are charged here.
I have pointed out that every Dublin constituency is required to have hundreds and up to 1,000 in excess of population over the national average and, indeed, in many other cases, if not in most constituencies, particularly on the western seaboard where as we know the population has been progressively reduced, without going into the reasons for it, Dáil representation is obtainable on lower terms, speaking in terms of votes, than in Dublin. Why should this be? The people said it was undesirable and that it should not be. The people even in the west of Ireland in the constituencies which were supposed to benefit by the referendum proposals said they did not want any part of it. They said they were satisfied that this socalled tolerance—a word invented to twist the truth by this Government, to make things appear as they were not —is something with which they were not concerned. They were, in fact, quite content and what they said, in effect, in their vote in the referendum was that they were content to be judged on the same basis as every other citizen and have the same rights and privileges as every other citizen and did not wish for any more. Regardless of that, the Minister is now saying: "I do not care what you say. I will insist on this going through. This is my solution. I will create a disparity between the number of votes it takes to elect a Deputy in the Dublin area and the number of votes it takes to elect a Deputy in Mayo."
The Minister will create that disparity for his own obscure reasons. These reasons are really illusory. He probably believes that in doing this he is maintaining to some extent the position of his own Party but, no matter how he tries to paint the picture, nobody in this House will be convinced of anything else but that everything to which he puts his hand is founded on the one idea—the good, not of the country, but of Fianna Fáil. We must assume, therefore, that this Bill is shaped, so far as he can shape it, for the benefit of Fianna Fáil, the Fianna Fáil Party and this Fianna Fáil Government.
It is illusory to think that anybody can do any manipulation of any consequence in these modern days except, perhaps, in certain areas, very few areas, in which Government Deputies may have certain pockets of strength. Over the country at large it would be impossible to estimate how Party lines join and where they separate. It is difficult enough, talking to people, to tell in what direction their political allegiance lies. The generation today does not freely disclose its political affiliations. It is not as ingenuous as generations past. People today do not wear their political hearts on their sleeves because they may sense a certain danger in certain circumstances, particularly if they are in jobs of a certain kind.
I will vote against this measure on the general principle that it is antagonistic to the idea of democratic treatment of the people of this city and county, in the first instance, and to the whole concept of democracy, as I know it and as it is enshrined in the Constitution. The Labour Party will use the Bill to try to get some improvements made in general electoral procedure. I referred on a previous occasion here to experiences I have had in elections: people arrive at polling stations to find they may not vote because their names are not on the register. These people have lived in the particular locality for a number of years and they find it inexplicable when they are prevented from voting in an election even though they voted in earlier elections without any difficulty whatsoever. Invariably they approach a politician, if he happens to be present, for an explanation and it is incomprehensible to them that he cannot secure this right for them. Omissions from the register may be due to carelessness or a hundred and one other reasons which may not be apparent to all and sundry.
It is our hope that by amending this Bill on the Committee Stage we will lay the foundations of machinery designed to enable these people to exercise the franchise, even though their names are omitted from the register. It might be possible for them to swear an affidavit at the polling station which would entitle them to exercise the franchise. If something on those lines is not done there will be serious doubts as to the effectiveness of the democratic system. This sort of omission happens on a wide scale. It happened on a wide scale in the recent referendum. I met scores of people who had voted in earlier elections but who were unable to vote in the referendum because their names did not appear on the register. Nothing could be done about it. It is a very undesirable situation and it must be corrected. Some machinery must be designed to remedy the situation.
In the referendum, too, there was a breakdown in the power supply and people were left without lights. This could happen in any polling station. Provision should be made in this Bill designed to cope with emergencies of that kind where voting time is lost. We will be putting down amendments to that effect and one or two others. I hope they will be acceptable. This is one of the few opportunities we have and it should be availed of.
I think it was the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries who announced after the referendum that they would now set about the savage—the word "savage" was used — breaching of county boundaries. I do not know quite how savage this handiwork has been. I am not altogether enamoured of all this talk about the sacrosanct nature of county boundaries. I think they are a relatively modern concept, modern in the historic sense. I do not suppose they are any more than 250 or 300 years old and they are vague at that.
