The DOBlog

Tag: general_election

  • Little victories..(?)

    The good news

    The Minister for the Environment today announced the establishment of a Commission to review the electoral constituencies. This is exactly what he said couldn’t be done a few weeks ago, before the constitutional challenge to the current state of the constituencies was launched as the ‘final census figures weren’t in’.

    The figures that were available were good enough though to form the basis of funding allocations under the Local Government Fund.

    So after weeks of denying there was a problem that needed to be sorted out, Minister Roche as convened a commission to sort out the problem. I wonder if he will have to “bash some heads together” like he did when he went to Galway to part the waters?

    The even better news

    The even better news is that there could now be a full 6 months for Fianna Fail and the Progressive Democrats to club together and push through all those reforms they had promised as part of their election manifestos policy statements about things that might be important in an election. They’ve costed them all and were just looking for a fresh mandate to do them.

    Sure, hasn’t the constitution given them a few more months to deliver the goods.

    53 promises from Bertie equates to about 10 a month. I wonder if they’ll start with the promises in FF’s Economic policy manifesto document ? Or will the PDs get their way and tinker with stamp duty?

    Will they put something in place in the next 6 months to address the flaws in the processes underpinning the Electoral Register (look for posts earlier than 18th April on this one!)? After all, Minister Roche seems to be getting into his problem solving, head-bashing stride.

    Come on gang… a lot done, more to do.

    …or will they still leap lemming -like into the arms of the Electorate before the end of June?

  • DoBlog is 1 year old this month

    Last night I was doing some housekeeping on the site and I noticed that the year-ometer on the DoBlog is about to turn over. The first post on www.obriend.com (as it was then) was on 18th April 2006. It was about the Electoral Register.

    With an Election looming in the next few weeks it is worth revisiting where we are on that particular issue.

    • The Electoral Register issues are still not resolved
    • There does not appear to have been any substantive analysis of the actual root causes (apart from some work I did off my own bat as a concerned citizen)
    • The work that was done to ‘correct’ the Register was managed inconsistently between Local Authority areas, which means that we may not have improve the accuracy all that much.
    • That work was completed a while ago… the Register will have degraded in quality again since
    • It seems that entire housing estates (even in the Minister’s own constituency) may have been dropped off the Register

    Over on McGarr Solicitors site I paraphrased Paul Simon to describe the state of the Register -“Still broken after all these years”. It is. The scrap and rework was botched and it wasn’t even the right thing to do.

    With most elections or polls in Ireland now being decided by the narrowest of margins it is more important than ever that everyone of us who can vote in the forthcoming General Election does vote. It was once said that in a democracy you don’t always get the government you want, you get the government you deserve.

    So vote. Vote diligently.