Healy-Rae resists cut in constituencies

A KERRY TD has said the county should retain its two constituencies.

Michael Healy-Rae made the submission to the ongoing review of electoral boundaries.

He also told the Constituency Commission that if seats were to be lost as a result of its work, these should be in “the larger urban areas”.

The closing date for submissions is tomorrow.

Mr Healy-Rae said Kerry was a vast county geographically, with three large peninsulas in Kerry South, and needed two constituencies in order to be properly represented.

He is the only Kerry TD to have made a submission, despite the threat of the loss of a seat. If Kerry is joined as one constituency, it is believed it will have five rather than six seats.

South Kerry covers “an extremely large diversity of countryside” and joining it with Kerry North would most likely lead to the loss of a TD, wrote Mr Healy-Rae.

“To try to cover such a large area and offer the adequate advice, support and assistance that is needed to the people in the constituency would be an extremely difficult task.”

Urban TDs had “an easier job” when it came to covering their constituency, he said.

“I believe that you cannot compare rural Ireland to larger urban areas where you have a concentration of people in a very small area and where I believe TDs have an easier job in covering their constituency.

The commission’s terms of reference provide that it will recommend constituencies based on a reduced number of TDs. The overall number of TDs is to be between 153 and 160. Previously the range was 164 to 168.

There is to be no fewer than one TD for every 30,000 in population and not more than one TD for each 20,000.

At present Kerry has its greatest ever number of Oireachtas representatives, with six TDs, three each in the Kerry South and Kerry North-West Limerick constituencies; five senators, four of them in Kerry South; with Munster MEP Seán Kelly also based there.

Kerry South, with 77,756 in population, has one TD for every 25,919 voters. Kerry North-West Limerick has a population of 80,650 — 26,883 people per TD.