I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Noonan, for his indulgence. I wanted to make a few comments on the legislation before the House and the fact that this is the product of a new entity, the Electoral Commission, that we have been long promised and has been long talked about. It is great to actually have it in existence. All other electoral boundaries that were presented, and by convention passed without amendment, were proposed by an ad hoc commission, though always of a very eminent kind. This is the first time we have had a statutory permanent commission, the remit of which goes well beyond electoral boundaries and very importantly will be looking at a whole range of electoral law issues that are fundamental to our democracy.
By convention, we do not normally propose amendments to this legislation because every Deputy would have his own views on the correct decisions in terms of boundaries. However, I have to put on the record of the House the great degree of concern that has been expressed. I have represented the constituency of Wexford, as I said last night, for 37 years in this House. For all that time, it was the geographical entity that is County Wexford. For the first time in a very long time, it is being divided now and not in any rational or coherent way. The top third of the county has been sliced off. The guidelines given to the Electoral Commission were to respect county boundaries as far as practicable. Obviously it is not practicable when you are trying to get accurate and fair numbers but where county boundaries were to be breached, electoral area boundaries were to be respected. In terms of the new constituency of Wicklow-Wexford, that is not the case. There will be a situation now where there will be county councillors in the areas of Kilmuckridge or Enniscorthy whose electoral area will be part of two different Dáil constituencies. I do not think that is best for coherence and I hope this will be a very temporary situation.
The county boundaries are important - the Minister of State's colleague Deputy Matthews said last night that they are not, that they are a Victorian or 19th-century concept and that we have to be thinking beyond boundaries - not only in terms of people's natural affinity and affiliation but also in terms of public administration. Think of the county council, the providers of public services, the people we look to in terms of crisis, flood or storm. It is our county council we look to in those situations. It is important that, as far as possible, county councillors have a coherent set of Dáil Deputies to whom they look to argue for the needs of their county, whether that is around transport, housing or issues at an emergency level like fire and flood and so on. I hope the division of Wexford in the way it has happened in this review will be temporary.
I made my own submission to the commission. I was one of many. I argued, obviously, for the coherent keeping of a county boundary in my own county of Wexford. I also argued for the creation of six-seat constituencies. I think the Minister of State would agree with my analysis that the whole idea of our form of proportional representation, the single transferable vote, PR-STV, is designed to give proportionality. Perfect proportionality cannot be achieved in small constituencies. If there are three seats in a constituency, you cannot have a truly proportional representative result. The votes are skewed. A six-seat constituency would give a much better proportionate result from the people's number one vote on a ballot paper than a three-seater, a four-seater or a five-seater. It would be something desirable for the future. It was not possible and I dare say the Minister of State and his party would have argued for this particular commission's work to allow for six-seaters. The more three-seaters there are, the more disproportionate the outcome will be.
We have worked very well in coalition structures in this jurisdiction. In parliaments like that of the UK, for example, there are disproportionate results. In other words, if a party gets 40% or 45% of the first preference vote at an election it will get an overall majority, sometimes a thumping overall majority. Then in the next election, a similar minority will give a different government. Policy oscillates, often to extremes and often to the detriment of the continuum of public policy. A more representative parliament that has all strands of opinion is a good thing. It anchors more people to our democratic institutions. I would hope that is something the Minister of State will take from this debate and bring back to the Department. Sometimes larger parties, and those that will become larger parties, will have a different perspective when they have power and they will say that maybe it is as well not to make that change. Overall, in the fullness of the political system, it is a much better representative situation and a much better outcome for democracy. If people feel their views are not represented in the national Parliament, as happens in many jurisdictions right now, they are actually turned off by the political system because it is not representative of them. They are very easily manipulated then to undermine democracy itself. That is a very important point.
One thing that is a perennial point of debate in all the discussions we have about elections is the accuracy of the electoral register. I welcome a number of the innovations we now have, such as people being able to register online. Having an open register is very important. People can register at any time and we now have pre-registration for younger people, who can register even before they are 18 on the basis that when they turn 18 they will be formally included in the register of electors. All of those are good reforms but I still think we need to ensure people are on it. Having ads telling them to check the register is a good thing but I do not think it is enough. I am not sure I can present an alternative to that but we need to have some sort of campaign, even if it is a door-to-door campaign, asking people if they are on the register and telling them to check. When a new estate is built and people move in, maybe they could get a note from the local authority telling them they need to register if they want their vote to be counted and telling them how to do it.
I recommend that sort of outreach approach, as opposed to passively leaving it up to people to do it.
Another point that is important to make is of fundamental importance to the future of democracy in this country and in the world. The undermining of democracy through disinformation and misinformation has been seen starkly in some referendums internationally. The role of analytics and manipulation of public information targeted at individuals, for example during the Brexit referendum campaign, has shocked many people into thinking we need to protect our electoral process. More and more people, especially young people, get all their information online. My generation assumed that the way to get information in an unbalanced way was from the State broadcaster or the national newspapers, but that is no longer the source from which most people consume information. Algorithms now generate people's information stream and often deepen prejudice because people are led incrementally down an alleyway of disinformation. I hope it will be an important task of the Electoral Commission to tackle that. It will be a monumental job and it cannot be done in Ireland alone. It will have to be done in concert with other democratic countries.
For much of my political career, I was of the view that we were on a path to further and deeper democracy, and to the spread of democratic values, as part of the natural course of history. Recent years have indicated that is not necessarily the case. We have a significant rise in autocracy. One of the startling things I read recently from Eurostat was that up to 30% of young Europeans now admire the strong person - I was going to say the strong man - type of leader. We see that manifested in elections across the globe. It is as though we have forgotten or lost the lessons we learned from the 1930s about the strong person and how destructive, brutal and tyrannical the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazi Germany became and was from the beginning, in truth. Yet, many people now laud the strong person and say what we need is a strong autocratic leader. We need to take stock of that, as the preservation of our democratic values is not set in stone. They can be undermined. I hope one of the jobs the Electoral Commission will do is to look internationally at how we can work to tackle disinformation and address the issue of selling the values of democracy, which is, in Churchill's words, a bad system, but the best available. That is the simple truth. Our democratic systems are far from perfect. They fail people in many instances, but they are better than anything else on offer and certainly better than the autocratic systems we see rising in strength elsewhere.
With regards to the work emanating from the future of Europe debate and how we will progress the European Union, one of the things that concerns me is the rise of autocrats. I hope we have seen a reversal of that in Poland's most recent election, but unfortunately there has been a step in the wrong direction in Slovakia. Orbán in Hungary is in essence blackmailing the European Union by using funding for Ukraine to make demands. We also need to strengthen the value systems in the EU and to ensure the norms we understood to be the cornerstone of the liberal democratic traditions of Europe are enshrined.
I have said all I want to say about this Bill. I got up to put on the record my deep concerns about the division of my constituency and the way it was done, since I cannot vote against it. Someone described it by saying it seemed as though the rest of the jigsaw was done and that was the last piece so whatever fit in was included. It was a sundering of a constituency. I hope this constituency of Wicklow-Wexford will be temporary. I wish whoever is elected in that constituency well. It will be a three-seater constituency. They will have to represent two counties with the expectation or half-expectation that the constituency will not be sustained. Therefore, they may be inclined, depending on the particular Deputy's vote base, to focus most of their work on either Wicklow or Wexford.
