The Government is responsible for an expensive and "monumental" blunder in underestimating the storage space needed for controversial electronic voting machines, Fine Gael said today.
It emerged today that continers specially purchased by the Government to house the electronic voting machines in one centralised location are too small.
Just 4,700 of the 7,500 machines will fit in the containers at Gormanston Army Camp and the State will now have to continue paying for private space to store the remaining 2,800 machines, the Department of the Environment admitted.
Private briefing papers prepared for Tánaiste and Minister for Finance Brian Cowen reveal that the containers are too small.
Fine Gael TD Fergus O'Dowd
"The containers cannot accommodate the number of machines that had been anticipated," the papers state. "The ancillary equipment [such as tilt tables and hand trucks] is also taking up more space than had been envisaged."
Fine Gael environment spokesman Fergus O'Dowd said Fianna Fáil "continues to squander taxpayers' cash on e-voting with further screw-ups".
"Almost a million euro annually is being spent to meet the costs in storing the machines separately in each constituency as well as the guts of €60 million wasted on the overall scheme. Fianna Fáil's solution was to move all the machines to a centralised location but now we find that the location set aside for this purpose in Gormanstown can only house 62 per cent of the machines," Mr O'Dowd said.
"Alongside this monumental blunder, it has been revealed that the containers purchased at taxpayers' expense to store the machines are too small and useless.
"These screw-ups highlight, once again, Fianna Fáil's phenomenal capacity to waste public money. This project has been ill-thought out, mismanaged to the extreme and has resulted in millions and millions of taxpayers' money being frittered away."
The Fine Gael TD said that with public confidence in e-voting at "zero" it should immediately be scrapped before more blunders resulted in more public money being "sent down the drain".
The Department of the Environment has said the machines that cannot be stored at Gormanston will remain with returning officers "pending the identification of additional premises".
The Government has so far spent an estimated €52 million on the electronic voting machines, which were used on a pilot basis in a number of constituencies in the 2002 general election. The hi-tech voting system most famously resulted in a shock for former Fine Gael TD and minister for justice Nora Owen when she lost her Dublin North Dail seat.
Plans to roll out e-voting throughout the State were eventually put on ice due to concerns about the lack of an audit trail and the possibility of tampering with the machines or the software used to handle the complex PR voting system.
Returning officers in each constituency acquired storage space for the machines, at a cost of about €700,000 per year to the State.
The briefing paper that revealed the latest twist in the e-voting controversy was released to the Irish Examinerunder the Freedom of Information Act.