Last Sunday's Sunday Tribune had an article suggesting that if the next general election was to take place near the end of this Dáil's five-year term - as appears to be the intention of the Taoiseach - it would have to be preceded by a further redistribution of the constituencies.
This would be based on the 2006 census rather than on the distribution recommended by the Constituency Commission in January last year.
As stated in the article, the determination of constituencies for Dáil elections is governed by Article 16.3 of the Constitution, but it is also affected by Section 16.4.
This Article was drafted at a time when censuses were still held at 10-year intervals rather than every five years.
Section 16.4 accordingly provided that Dáil constituencies must be revised "at least once in every 12 years, with due regard to changes in population", while Section 16.3 laid down that "the ratio between the number of members to be elected at any time for each constituency and the population of each constituency, as ascertained at the last preceding census, shall, so far as is practicable, be the same throughout the country".
The provisions of this Article might seem to guarantee a fair electoral system, but in fact it left a number of issues to be decided by the Dáil - the government of the day - and for over 40 years, between 1937 and 1977, various efforts were made by different politicians to distort the system.
The first significant change to the electoral system with which the British had endowed us in 1921 was the elimination of large constituencies.
In 1937 the maximum size of constituencies was reduced from nine to seven, and in 1948 it was further cut to the present maximum of five.
This elimination of larger constituencies helped to squeeze out independents, giving more seats to party candidates.
In the 1950s the Fianna Fáil national vote dropped by several points to an average of under 45 per cent, and at the end of that decade, despite opposition protests, a gerrymandered constituency revision was enacted by that party.
This was designed to give more seats to constituencies in rural areas where the Fianna Fáil vote remained strong. In mainly urban areas, where the party was weaker, more votes would be needed to elect deputies.
In some instances the ratio of seats to population thus proposed deviated by up to 20 per cent from the national average - this defied the requirements set out in Article 16.3.
This gerrymandered constituency scheme was successfully challenged by a Fine Gael senator, John O'Donovan, in the High Court.
Incidentally, in striking it down, Mr Justice Budd dismissed a suggestion by counsel for the government that bigger rural constituencies required a higher ratio of TDs to make it easier for them to look after their constituents' individual problems.
The judge said most pointedly that there was no "direction whatsoever in the Constitution" that such matters be taken into consideration.
Although Mr Justice Budd did not say what scale of deviation from the national average ratio of seats to population would be permissible, governments thereafter were careful not to depart by more than 5 per cent from the national average.
However, Kevin Boland, as Fianna Fáil minister for local government, then thought up an ingenious way to gerrymander within this 5 per cent tolerance.
He divided into three-seat constituencies those parts where Fianna Fáil was strong enough to win two out of three seats, while arranging four-seat constituencies in Dublin where Fianna Fáil, with even less than a minority of votes, could win half the seats.
In 1969 this wheeze enabled Fianna Fáil to win over 52 per cent of Dáil seats with 45.7 per cent of the votes; a Fianna Fáil seat bonus that, since that party entered the Dáil in 1927, had been attained only once.
Despite objections which I made in cabinet, the national coalition government of 1973-1977, in which Jimmy Tully of Labour was minister for local government, then sought to effect a reverse gerrymander.
This "Tullymander" as it came to be known - which was based on what turned out to be a false assumption as to the votes likely to be cast for national coalition candidates in the 1977 election - backfired on its authors, delivering to Fianna Fáil the biggest seat bonus that party had ever secured.
After that a sense of fairness prevailed.
In 1979 Jack Lynch initiated a process under which after each census an independent commission would recommend a constituency distribution.
These independent revisions have involved deviations of not more than 8 per cent from the national average ratio of seats to votes. By convention, the government of the day and the Dáil accept these redistributions without demur, and since 1997 these electoral commissions have been given statutory authority.
To return to the issue raised in the Sunday Tribune, constituency revisions have always been based on the final population data for electoral districts in the first full volume of each census that is published 15 or 16 months after the census is taken.
It is true that preliminary population data have in recent times been published about three months after each census, but these figures are never used for constituency revisions because they are subject to a margin of error. These errors are usually quite small, but in individual cases they can be significant, up to 15 per cent in the case of some small areas.
The commission making recommendations based on the 2002 census did not report until a year and nine months after that census. The reason for this was that it was not appointed until after publication in July 2003 of Volume 1 of that census containing the authoritative figures.
As the equivalent volume of the 2006 census is unlikely to be published until around July 2007, the next constituency revision could not be undertaken until after the end of the life of the present Dáil, so the next election will be based on the existing January 2004 constituency revision.
Last week's article, written before I had completed all of my analysis of the 2003 local election results, somewhat overstated the extent of the Fianna Fáil mishandling of that campaign. That party's transfer of preferences on the elimination of its candidates was, however, in fact one-third greater than in 1999, and the proportion of those transfers lost to Fianna Fáil was slightly greater than in that year, with a higher proportion of them than in 1999 going to Fine Gael.