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Census By April-Should that mean a Constituency Redraw?
Read more about: Census, Irish Election
The four month advance calender from the CSO is not the biggest headline grabber. Except in an election year. The calender, released 5 Jan, confirms that the 2006 Census will be released no later than April 30th. I’m not a legal scholar, so I leave it open to readers to reckon whether the legitimacy of any election after April will remain intact. The constitution seems to require a redraw following a Census though FF would never dice with power unless they have good advice that they could see out a Surpreme Court case if they won.
Should a Census in April mean a redraw so close to an election?
My understanding is that the government has an “out” in that the redrawing only need be done as soon as is practicable, which they can argue is not the case for new census numbers so close to an election. But one point of interest will be how close the new numbers are to the preliminary numbers released last year — and there’s not much reason to think they’ll be different. Those numbers already revealed constituencies that had gone too small, in which case there might be a legal argument that there was enough time to take action.