Reaction: the critic: Mr Joe McCarthy could hardly contain himself as the Government's e-voting website briefly went offline yesterday and was replaced with a note announcing a suspension of its e-voting plan.
"It's a clear vindication of all the concerns that I have raised about the system in the past six months," says the computer consultant and tallyman who led the opposition to the Government.
"They [the Government] have used a number of pejorative terms to describe me, including publicity-seeker and crank. I've even been labelled an anti-globalisation supporter," he says. "I'm simply delighted and overjoyed."
Mr McCarthy, who worked with IBM before setting up his own computer consultancy, has spent most of the past two years researching electronic voting. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he accumulated hundreds of pages of documents revealing weaknesses in the e-voting plan.
"I am jealously independent and carefully independent. I am not a member of a political party and have not accepted money for the campaign," he said. "But I've been an election agent at every Dáil election since 1987... Most of all I am a concerned citizen."
Mr McCarthy, who made submissions to the Oireachtas Committee on the Environment and Local Government, expressed concern that the testing procedures for the Government's e-voting were hugely inadequate.
But despite being written off as some sort of technophobe, Mr McCarthy insists that he does not oppose electronic voting systems if they are adequately tested and constructed.
"Electronic voting has a singular advantage in that it helps 1 per cent of people who make mistakes when voting," he said. "But the system bought by the State was completely undesirable."
Asked about the €40 million spent on the voting machines, he replies simply: "What a scandalous waste of money."