Government Chief Whip Tom Kitt, has admitted there are serious issues with the electoral register but has promised that action is being taken.
Mr Kitt said Minister for the Environment Dick Roche was assigning new resources to the area, including an increase of €57 million in total general purpose grants to local government this year.
Recent reports in the Sunday Tribuneestimated that the electoral register could be out by up to 860,000 voters.
Deputies faced Mr Kitt with suggestions that the upcoming census, due to be carried out in April, could be used to update the electoral register. However, he rejected the idea, saying that census workers would be operating to a tight schedule and would be fully occupied over the nine-week period. "There is no scope for any additional duties to be carried out," he said.
There have been suggestions that PPS numbers could be connected to the electoral register to cut down on innacuracies. At present, there are 300,000 more people on the electoral register than are eligble to vote.
Dáil deputies were unhappy with the suggestion that the census information could not be used to overhaul the electoral register, despite Mr Kitt's insistence that several factors, including confidentiality, ruled it out.
