Electoral Commission Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-15 ============================================================ Mary Fitzpatrick (FF), Industrial and Commercial Panel I thank the Minister of State for his response. It would be nice to have a copy of it; we will get it from the transcript. However, I have to say it is terribly disappointing. The Minister of State's response has essentially just described the process. We are all aware of the process. We are all very engaged in and understand how many people participated and contributed, and how many councillors and officials gave of their time, energy and talents to produce a report. The Government has a very significant task and has an awful lot of demands on it. I urge the Minister of State to push the Government to respond meaningfully to our elected representatives and, most important, our local communities. Our local authorities, councillors and communities deserve it. They want to know what the Government's response is to this detailed, evidence-based, informed report. They also want to know what action the Government will take to support local communities, local democracy and our elected local representatives. When it comes to the boundary review, I would appreciate if the Minister of State would ask the Electoral Commission to come back to us with a written report or statement on how it proposes to undertake the boundary reviews. We are very conscious it is not just a local electoral boundary review. There are potentially general election and European election boundary reviews. The Electoral Commission is doing fine work, but is it really set up to undertake three reviews in a short timeframe with all the other demands that are going on? It would be helpful to me and other Members if we could get such a statement from the Electoral Commission. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-07-15/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:16+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-15