A Chara,

Thank you for the opportunity of expressing our views on this subject.

It is of utmost importance that county boundaries are respected in the drawing up of constituency boundaries. Apart from in large cities the county is the the fundamental unit of local government and local and national government need to be in harmony.

The proportion of TDs to voters is not the only measure of representation and the location, proximity and nature of representations is important. While the theory may suggest otherwise the reality is that where a small section of a county is included in the constituency of an adjoining county the citizens concerned have little meaningful representation.

Therefore ideally constituencies should coincide with counties even if this results in fewer Dáil representatives. For the Dáil  I would strongly urge that Laois should be a constituency on its own.

For Europe I would urge that Laois remains in the South constituency sharing representation with its neighbours Kilkenny, Carlow and Tipperary.

 Mise, le meas,

Anthony Fitzpatrick