More talk about the register

Stephen Collins’ column in Saturday’s Irish Times (subs. req’d) raises another potential problem with the electoral register (some existing problems discussed by us here and Sarah Carey here) — that since the census results will be available by the next election, there is scope for a legal challenge on the grounds that a constituency has fallen below its minimum constitutional entitlement of 1 TD per 30,000 people.  [Collins states this as a requirement based on voters but Article 16 clearly refers to population, not voters].  While clever lawyers may have thought of solutions to this problem already, one thing for the long-term agenda might be to amend Article 16 to raise the upper limit to something like 1 TD per 50,000; attitudes to that may depend on whether one thinks that the 166 TDs that we already have are enough.  But the issue of whether the boundaries are appropriate is going to bite before that of the total size of the Dail does.