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Seanad Éireann díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 3 Oct 1984

Vol. 105 No. 10

Business of Seanad.

Before the next contribution, I want to get clarification on something. A question was raised as to the voting on the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 1984 and it was suggested that the níl votes should have been 14 rather than 13. It has now been brought to my attention that I am the person who is supposed not to have voted but in actual fact I passed through the tellers' lobby. I was talking to two people going through, so there is absolutely no doubt that I did vote. I would like, for the record of the House, that the voting situation be amended.

There is no doubt that you passed through the lobby. If you did not, there is something wrong.

You must have been talking to the wrong people going through the lobby.

I do not want to make an issue of it, but it is important. The vote on that Bill should be recorded properly, not improperly, and the fact is I did walk through the lobby. There were people talking to me going through and I would like the House to have the situation clarified.

We have had a statement from Senator Lanigan that he did vote níl on this occasion. This statement, of course, is accepted by everybody and it is on the record of the House that it is accepted. I, on behalf of all Members of the House, accept that he did vote níl on that occasion. We can leave it with the Cathaoirleach and his advisers to see whether this is sufficient record or whether anything else needs to be done.

To be fair to the officials who together mark the papers, we are not putting any blame on them because their job is just to mark the persons off as they call out their names and numbers. I feel that we as tellers will have to take a certain amount of responsibility. We may be apt to get a little careless at our job now and again. It is the tellers who are supposed to see that the name is marked before the Senator goes through. I want to make it very clear that we are not in any way attaching any blame to the officials for what happened.

Acting Chairman

Thank you, Senator Ryan. I was just about to make that point, that the tellers took responsibility for the vote as it was at that time, as it was shown and recorded. All we can do now is accept the correction and accept, of course, Senator Lanigan's word and agree with the Leader of the House that there was an error, but that the tellers took responsibility for the vote as it was recorded then. There is nothing else we can do about it now, except to ensure that it does not happen again, in so far as it is humanly possible.

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