Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It was interesting listening to Deputy Quinlivan. From experience, I can say that a party can go from being very big to very small very quickly.

During my time in local government, I spent a lot of time thinking about the issue of posters. Dublin City Council came around to the view that it had more powers to work on the issue than it realised. That was when it took the initiative to regulate the number of public meeting posters. We saw, in the past, the use of public meeting posters to tee-up a candidate, if you want to put it like that. I have no issue with that; it is an important part of democracy. The council decided to regulate that and specified that only a percentage of the poster could be dedicated to the candidate. A maximum number was defined. The council said that it owned the street poles and could decide what went on them and how they would be regulated. While there are waivers and exemptions for the election under the litter laws, the council decided in that scenario it was going to regulate matters. It did that, and does that, and it works well. It is not a governance nightmare.

The only police we need are our competitors to tell the council when they have stepped out of line. It is a pity they were not able to get a proposal over the line which would have done the same for local elections. Dublin City Council put a proposal to its councillors that the local area committee would decide on 30, 40 or 50 junctions where people would hang one poster each, which is a very simple system. We could all see if someone had hung up more than one poster. All of the junctions would be agreed upon by the councillors, not by some bureaucrats in the Custom House.

If politicians do not tackle the issue of posters, the public and national Government will respond. The current system of posters is completely unsustainable. It is unsustainable more than anything else for the candidates who have to get the bloody things up. What we have to do then is get involved in "wallpaper", as I call it. One candidate has 300 posters so the next guy has to have 400 posters. Then he gets 400 posters and then posters go up at the last minute. It is a bizarre system and we have locked ourselves into a cycle. Whatever happens, I encourage us to make a move on this whether it is with the new Electoral Commission. With posters likely to be €10 per poster in the next election and we have rightly limited the ability to fundraise and for corporate donations, it will become unsustainable. My view is we will never get a system that will be perfectly regulated. We would be better to just put in a system and regulate each other.