Incompetent compiling of the register of electors has led to thousands of people being disenfranchised in each constituency at every election, the Dail was told. Mr Austin Deasy (FG, Water ford) said that up to 2,000 people were excluded from voting in his constituency in the last election and it could have been as high as 5,000. The lack of professionalism in compiling the register was "alarming", he said.

The current system was "just not good enough". He expressed sympathy for anybody who might lose an election by a few dozen votes or a couple of hundred, "because if the register was compiled properly they might not have lost".

The Minister for the Environment and Local Government, Mr Dempsey, accepted that errors occurred but he said the margin of error was about 1.2 per cent.

He wanted to see changes and one possibility might be the completion of a new register every year which would be feasible with new technology. Mr Dempsey hoped, however, that changes to the Electoral Act by the previous government would reduced the number of mistakes.