The decision on how to vote deserves the utmost respect from each of us to the other. There is no basic right to have information about how other voters intend to vote, or say how they intend to vote.
Pollsters and political scientists say that it is up to the legislators to demonstrate that the publication of opinion polls influences voter behaviour. I don't accept that the burden of scientific proof is on us. In any case, the methods which political scientists use to prove something cannot give a result to the question: "Do opinion polls influence voter behaviour?"
My experience of nearly 40 years as a practising politician tells me the following.
Irish elections are won and lost on very small numbers of votes in many cases. We have seen votes in single figures determine the last seat, with consequences for the composition of the next government. Referendums, too, have been determined on razor-thin margins.
The publication of opinion polls during elections is given the aura of incontrovertible fact about the likely outcome. People can weigh up claim and counterclaim about policies, and there is a healthy debate in this area. But polls are given the status of facts, unlike all other political claims in elections.
There is no doubt that a "momentum effect" can occur for candidates or parties in election campaigns. Most parties or candidates would very much want to do what they could to produce such an effect. If they can build that themselves with their political arguments, fair play to them.
But polls give a big boost to candidates and parties which are apparently front-runners. They create an extra momentum effect which is not the result of political argument. The temptation to prejudge winners and losers is then unavoidable, no matter what efforts professional pollsters make in good faith about health warnings on the polls, about snapshots in time, margins of error and so on.
It all heightens the suggestion we see in some media coverage that voting and elections are nothing more than a spectator sport, like a Grand National, with heroes and villains, fallers and gallant finishers.
The Labour Party is no stranger to this issue. At its last leadership contest in November 1997, the side of the present deputy leader complained about the publication of an opinion poll showing that the present leader was ahead. The number of electors for the leadership was fewer than 100.
Deputy Brendan Howlin was quoted in The Irish Times as saying: "My view was very strong at the time that the poll had an influence on the election for the party leadership." He never retracted that view.
The implication was that even politically astute people, including members of the Oireachtas, could be influenced by the results of an opinion poll.
The ban on opinion polls is set in precise terms. It deals only with systematic polls which purport to be representative of public opinion.
Contrary to some wild and mischievous speculation, straw polls, phone-in talk-show polls and Internet polls will not be covered, precisely because they do not seek to be truly representative of the population or of a part of it.
It is also wrong for the leader of the Labour Party, journalists, academics and political writers to suggest that canvassers could be forbidden from asking voters their opinions in the week before an election. This is about systematic polls based on representative samples only.
And lest anyone say that we are thereby permitting bad polls and banning good polls, I would say that bad polls are not real polls. They carry no weight and have no effect. The ban on real opinion polls in the last week of an election campaign will highlight the fact that any so-called polls published then will be entirely spurious.
We propose to ban the taking of opinion polls as well as their publication to deal with a point that it would be unfair to allow political parties to have the results of private polls and to withhold that information from the public.
People raising a hue and cry about this proposal on the principle of freedom of expression have long tolerated, and even supported, the ban on political advertising. They never complain about the moratorium on political debate on television or radio imposed by RTE and the IRTC.
No caller is allowed to talk to Joe Duffy or anyone else on air about politics one day before an election. People accept there can be such restraints on free speech.
We are not banning any expression of opinion by political commentators, journalists, pollsters, politicians themselves or anyone else. People will be free to make predictions and express opinions as they wish. They will simply not be able, in the last week of a campaign, to end all argument, and assume the status of incontrovertible fact, by citing data from the latest opinion poll.
Voters should be able to consider issues for the last week of a campaign free from the overwhelming presence of apparent fact about the outcome of the election that has not yet been held. A ban on the publication of opinion polls for one week is a small price to pay to help ensure an undistorted debate in the last week of a campaign.
As for publishers, the price of forgoing sales generated by publication of polls for just one week is not too high to impose on a healthy media sector.
The conduct of our political debate for elections and referendums will be improved by this measure. And I have no doubt that election candidates, members of the press and the public will not find themselves bereft of political debating points for the last week of election campaigns just because we will have no opinion polls to drown out all other discussion.