An upcoming article co-authored by Seth Barrett Tillman, an associate professor at Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology, argues that Ireland’s proportional representation voting system “sounds fair in theory, but it is not always fair in actual practice”.

It says an election candidate in Kerry needs just over 13,000 votes to be elected, while a candidate in Dublin Central needs only 6,500 votes — “the classic problem of the rotten borough”.

The article, co-authored with Daniel Epstein-O’Dowd and due to be published in a future edition of the Irish Law Times, suggests that the “primary cause of the problem” is the constitutional provision tying a constituency’s number of TDs to its total population.

It argues that this gives more power to voters living among “large numbers of non-voters, such as children and (non-voter) migrants” in comparison to “a similarly placed group of Irish voters in another constituency with fewer or no children or migrants”.

The authors propose holding a referendum to amend Article 16 of the Constitution to instead correlate the number of seats within a constituency with its eligible voters.

“At the margins, such a system is likely to shift representation out of Ireland’s two or three largest cities towards the midlands and more rural constituencies,” they conclude.

“Such a shift, we think, would be desirable because that is where Ireland’s voters are.

“Maybe, in the end, instead of Kerry having a quota of 13,000 and Dublin Central having a quota of 6,500, constituencies across the island would have roughly the same quota somewhere between the two.”