Roche: no extending deadline to register

ENVIRONMENT Minister Dick Roche yesterday refused to extend the deadline for voters to check the electoral register beyond November 25.

Mr Roche told a meeting of an all-party Oireachtas committee that no local authority has indicated to him that an extension of time was needed.

He further argued that extending the deadline could require amending legislation and would pose difficulties in terms of completing the final register by February 15 2007, as is required by law.

The environment committee, chaired by Fianna Fáil TD Sean Haughey, last week wrote a draft letter to Mr Roche asking him to extend the deadline.

Committee members contended that because updating the register involved such change - some 500,000 names have been removed from registers nationwide - the Government should give more time to people to check if their names remain on the register.

However, Mr Roche argued that of the 500,000 names removed, some 170,000 had been written to, of which a third already responded. He said a €1.2 million media campaign had raised awareness.

He accepted the register had problems. Some 1,400 names had been removed in Waterford City — many of those were names of deceased people, he said.

Mr Roche defended the requirements for the supplemental register. He said that garda authentication was required to prevent fraud.

“If there is any suspicion that a voting register has been artificially expanded in any constituency, I will be issuing very strong recommendation that [polling officers] should challenge one in four people [who vote at polling stations],” he said.

The Fine Gael and Labour environment spokesmen Fergus O’Dowd and Eamon Gilmore contended that the November 25 deadline would not give people enough time to check that they were on the register.

“What is been done here is the same disenfranchising of poor and marginalised people that we saw in Florida [in the 2000 US elections],” Mr Gilmore said. Ciaran Cuffe of the Greens said the problems highlighted the need for an independent electoral commission.

The meeting came as the Supreme Court yesterday overturned as unconstitutional a regulation compelling all 30 persons required to nominate a non-party candidate in general elections to personally attend local authority offices to authenticate nominations. This was deemed disproportionate to the objective of authenticating nomination papers.

The challenge was brought by Thomas King, Mayo; William Stack, Athlone; Benedict Cooney, Dublin, and Denis Riordan, Limerick, who all sought to be candidates for election.