Democrat Editorial: Democracy, the Dáil and calculators

Donegal has once again been rejected as a single county constituency or two three-seaters for the purposes of elections to Dáil Éireann.

Again it appears that the calculator and maths has trumped the good old fashioned democratic yearnings of just wanting to vote for candidates who understand your concerns and are located within a defined and already established geographic location.   

Now, a sizeable chunk of the south Donegal population, is to remain amalgamated with our friends in Leitrim and Sligo, to represent their Donegal brothers and sisters in the national parliament. 

Our ‘County’ constituency currently comprises the county of Donegal, except for those nine Electoral Divisions in the south, which equates to 9,384 of the county’s population. 

The Electoral Commission said yesterday that their main consideration regarding the Donegal constituency was the removal of the breach in the southern part of the county. 

Obviously, that did not materialise.

They concluded that this was not possible, as adding this population would have resulted in an unacceptably high variance of 12.92%, whatever that means. 

And if they had gone back to two three seater constituencies, as prior to 2016, it would have precluded the removal of the county boundary breach in northern Roscommon, the reduction in the county boundary breach in the eastern part of Co. Galway and the removal of the breach of the Mayo county boundary.

They then considered extending the breach by transferring four of Donegal’s EDs with a population of 1,356 into the Sligo-Leitrim constituency and while this would have have 

“allowed for better variances in the Donegal and Sligo-Leitrim constituencies”, they opted against it . 

And as they “favoured maintaining continuity”, they “did not want to extend the breach unnecessarily”.

So whatever way, you dress it up, this farce of a situation is set to continue, not alone by disenfranchising south Donegal Dáil voters with two other counties, that in the case of Sligo, is not even bordering Donegal, but is located in a separate province, as is Leitrim.  

This is in no way being disrespectful in any way to either county, but we would not have accepted it, if they in turn, had been roped in with Donegal.