The election may be over but the controversy over the electoral register shows a deep inertia, at the mildest, in sections of official Ireland.

We thought we were the only family that had offspring who when they moved elsewhere still received voting cards at home.

For the head of the Electoral Commission Art O’Leary to say publicly that there may be up to 500,000 or half a million wrongly issued voting cards is horrifying.

While the individual county voting registers may be the responsibility of the individual county councils, to acknowledge that they don’t talk to each other would be laughable if it did not display such a cavalier attitude to the whole democratic process.

But there is a ready-made solution which I have not seen mentioned anywhere, the public services card should be given the legislative status of a compulsory national identity card; this was the original intention of the card which a previous Government backed away from but the nettle should now be grasped.

Over five million cards have been issued, they are officially described as being “mandatory but not compulsory”.

This is a nonsense, there is a central data-base for the public services card, each person has an individual number which is used for almost all interactions with the State – such as social welfare payments, passport applications etc.

If it can be used in such personal dealings, there is no logical reason for it not to be used in compiling a national electoral register which is compulsory for each citizen to participate.

If the Department of Agriculture can follow the movements of seven million cattle and know precisely where each animal is on any given day, there is no reason why we cannot track the dwelling place of citizens entitled to vote.

The local authorities and the Department of the Environment, which used to be called the Department of Local Government, have failed in one of their most basic duties.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel at potentially enormous cost – we have seen enough wasteful expenditure.

The existing infrastructure underlying the public services card should be extended to cover the electoral process and the necessary legislation and privacy safeguards put in place.