TD who lost seat angry at county's division

Leitrim:Defeated Leitrim TD John Ellis has accused the Constituency Commission of being "totally irresponsible" in dividing the county in two.

Mr Ellis, who lost out in Roscommon-South Leitrim, said the commission had gone against its own rules which state that the breaching of county boundaries "shall be avoided as far as practicable".

He said his fate was sealed when the county, which was part of the four-seat Sligo-Leitrim constituency, was divided up into two new three-seaters, Sligo-North Leitrim and Roscommon-South Leitrim.

It left Leitrim, which has the smallest population in the country, without any TD for the first time in over 25 years.

"I hold the commission totally responsible for this because once they divided Leitrim up, they left it that there wasn't a full quota of votes in either part of the county," he said.

"Their responsibility is to the electorate, but their only responsibility in my opinion was to the computer. They took the handy way out.

"They didn't take into account that a whole county was left without Dáil representation as a result of their actions."

Mr Ellis said the commission now needed to look at the imbalance between urban and rural areas.

"The average TD in Dublin got elected with about 7,500 to 8,500 votes. There was no quota in rural Ireland of less than 10,000 votes. The people who want to vote in the west of Ireland are being deprived of representation."

The Save Leitrim Campaign, which gathered 14,000 signatures against the commission proposals, said it would be lobbying people in the county to ensure that Leitrim became one electoral area again in the next election.

Cormac Ó Suilleabháin, from the campaign group, said: "There are people in south Leitrim who will be 60 miles away from the nearest government TD.

"The people of Leitrim want their representation which they don't have and won't have if the boundaries are not redrawn."

The campaign has agreed with the Leitrim Observerto draft a submission which individuals can then send to the commission.