The November 25th electoral register deadline will not be extended, Minister for the Environment Dick Roche said today.
The Minister told the Oireachtas Environment Committee that he would not bow to Opposition pressure to give the electorate more time to be registered to vote.
He told the all-party body in Leinster House: "I'm not convinced that there is actually a need to do so, particularly given the level of public attention now being given to the registration process.
"But if any individual authority were to make a suggestion that it needed an extension, of course I would give detailed consideration to the matter."
It emerged last week that up to 600,000 people who died or moved address have been taken off the Register in individual local authority areas. Labour claimed in the Dail that credit card firms have more accurate information on people than the Register. Fine Gael's environment spokesman Fergus O'Dowd insisted at today's committee meeting that more time was needed to allow citizens to return completed application forms. "Some voters are only being written to now as we speak," he said. He added: "The system is perceived to be political and is not working." Labour TD Eamon Gilmore told the committee: "There are lots of people who have been taken off the Register and they don't know about it." Mr Gilmore claimed that post may not be delivered for periods of up to a week in areas like Glenageary, Dalkey of Cabinteely in south Co Dublin if a postman calls in sick. The minister also warned that checks will be in place to detect possible electoral fraud. "If there is any evidence out of this particular process that there are constituencies where there is dramatic out of line over-registration, then special attention will have to be paid to those constituencies on polling day." He added: "I don't want to make the process so easy that it will facilitate fraud." He said that individual local authority staff working on the Register must be satisfied that their records are accurate. Committee chairman Sean Haughey said the all-party body will address the issue of voter fraud in coming weeks. Members of the public can check whether they are correctly registered on the www.checktheregister.ie site.