Electoral legislation will have to be amended to give members of the public an extra fortnight to ensure their names are included in the electoral register, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has announced.
Confirming that the deadline for the public to send corrections to the draft register had been extended to December 9th, Mr Ahern told the Dáil that the Minister for the Environment had extended the deadline for local authorities to complete their registers from December 13th to December 29th.
"This will probably require amendment. We will provide for these changes by amending the Electoral (Amendment) Bill 2006, which is before the House."
Mr Ahern said political parties and local authorities had requested additional time to complete the work on the register. His comments followed 13 almost identical requests from Labour Party deputies in the Dáil yesterday for an extension to the deadline for the local authorities in their individual constituencies.
Labour leader Pat Rabbitte asked: "Is it correct that Fianna Fáil backbenchers forced the Minister for the Environment to back down on his refusal to budge on the deadline of November 25th regarding the electoral register issue?"
He said that the electoral register's "latest state is worse than its first, with deletions, inconsistencies, people removed", and he suggested that the Minister had "compounded the mess by extending the deadline from November 25th to December 29th".
Mr Rabbitte asked: "Will the resources be supplied to the local authorities so that they have no excuse to fail to achieve 99 per cent accuracy in the register? When the people were paying rates, there was no difficulty having an accurate register."
