Electoral Process

Thursday, 20 April 2023

Questions (304)

Carol Nolan

Question:

304. Deputy Carol Nolan asked the Minister for Justice the number of complaints of alleged electoral offences which have been made to An Garda Síochána for each year from 2000 to date; the number of Garda investigations which have been conducted on foot of such complaints; the number of individuals against whom charges were brought; the number of convictions; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [18640/23]

View answer

Written answers

Minister for Justice

As the Deputy will be aware, the Garda Commissioner is responsible for the management and administration of Garda business under Section 26 of the Garda Síochána Act 2005 (as amended). This includes the direction of investigative priorities for the service and the recording of information on Garda IT systems, including the PULSE database. As Minister, I have no role in these independent functions.

Additionally, the management of the courts, operational matters and logistical functions are the responsibility of the judiciary and Courts Service, which are independent in exercising their functions under the Courts Service Act 1998 and given the separation of powers in the Constitution. The Courts Service has a dedicated email address for the provision of information to members of the Houses of the Oireachtas: oireachtasenquiries@courts.ie.

To be of assistance to the Deputy, I have contacted the Garda authorities and have been advised of the following. Electoral Offences are recorded on PULSE under the Incident Type “Electoral Offences Including Personation”.

A search of PULSE was conducted for this Incident Type from 2000 onwards, and returned 127 incidents, categorised below by year of report. Due to data protection, figures of less than 10 in a given year are not reported and are denoted with '*'.

Year of Report	No of incidents
2000	0
2001	0
2002	*
2003	0
2004	*
2005	*
2006	0
2007	*
2008	*
2009	18
2010	*
2011	24
2012	*
2013	0
2014	19
2015	*
2016	11
2017	*
2018	*
2019	12
2020	*
2021	0
2022	0
2023	0

Data is operational and subject to change.

A search was conducted for charges for offences contrary to any of the following Acts:

Electoral Acts 1992 to 2022,

Local Elections Acts 1974 to 2014,

European Elections Acts 1992 to 2022,

Referendum Acts 1992 to 2022.

The overall number of charges returned was below 10, and so is too low to report on due to data protection concerns. As the Deputy will appreciate, convictions would also be less than 10.

I have been further advised that investigations are recorded on PULSE narratively, and therefore the system has no reporting capability for the number of investigations.