Seanad Electoral (University Members) (Amendment) Bill 2024: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2024-10-16
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

I have been reminded of one amendment, namely, amendment No. 61, which may have fallen between the stools when the Minister was addressing the others. It will be coming up shortly. One area that does not arise is the idea of the automatic transfer. This is no longer about the NUI or TCD constituencies, but whether, for all the institutions covered by this new constituency, the practice will be what was the practice previously, whereby there is opportunity for automatic enrolment upon graduation.
My amendment No. 61, for example, would suggest that on graduation, with the consent of the students, the relevant institute would transfer the names of all those who have graduated and who have consented to be included in the register. I think that would lead to a higher level of registration. As I said, that is with consent, so it is within general data protection regulation, GDPR, compliance.
It has generally been shown that students still have an attachment to the institution so, for example, the point of graduation or immediately prior to that is the best time in terms of registering. This is something that would facilitate that. That is amendment No. 61, which the Minister might recall from earlier. The word in the Bill is "may". I have suggested the word "shall" because it would be good practice. We know that where universities took that responsibility for asking their graduates whether they wanted to avail of their Seanad vote and then transferred them to register, we had much higher levels of registration. The Minister addressed the other points, so we will not go back over them.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2024-10-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:53:22+00:00
Sitting date: 2024-10-16