Gormley's decision to act on a change recommended by the High Court last month means that, if the new Dail runs its full term, there will be two separate redrawings of the Dail constituencies before the next general election . . . with major changes likely in both cases.

While the recently-established boundary commission will announce a much-needed redrawing of the constituencies later this year, Gormley's proposed legislation will mean that the next census in 2011 will prompt a second set of changes to be introduced around April 2012. This would make the recommendations of the upcoming boundary commission redundant.

The last three governments have run their full course and the current Dail could sit until summer 2012. However, faced with the uncertainty of a second set of constituency changes a month or two before a May or June 2012 general election, the taoiseach could instead opt to hold the next general election in 2011.

The legislative proposals from Gormley follow the landmark constitutional challenge taken by Independent TDs Catherine Murphy and Finian McGrath before the general election. In his judgement, Judge Frank Clarke found that at least seven constituencies were outside the constitution's requirement that all constituencies should have, within reason, the same ratio of TDs to population.

Clarke rejected suggestions that the government should have used the preliminary census figures . . . published in summer 2006 . . . to redraw the electoral boundaries in advance of May's general election. He ruled that the constitution required that the government had to wait until the final figures were published at the end of March 2007. He accepted that by then it would have been too late to establish a boundary commission to change the constituencies before the election.

However, Clarke recommended that, given their accuracy, the Oireachtas should consider using the preliminary figures to begin work on redrawing the constituencies.

He stressed that the constituencies would not be actually changed until the final figures were published. But he added that, given that there was unlikely to be any significant fine-tuning required after the final figures were made available, the use of the preliminary figures for "preliminary work" would allow the new constituencies "to be recommended to the Oireachtas very quickly".

The preliminary figures for the 2011 census will be available by the summer of that year, while final figures will be available by the end of March 2012 at the very latest. Given that work on a redrawing of constituencies will, under the proposed legislation, be allowed to begin in summer 2011 . . . with a rubber-stamping of the changes once the final figures are produced the following March . . . it will be extremely difficult for the government to resist a second set of changes to the constituencies before summer 2012.

However, if the government opted for an election in 2011, it would get around the problem of facing into a general election with constituencies redrawn just weeks earlier.

Political analyst Odran Flynn, who first raised the issue of the unconstitutionality of the current Dail constituencies in the Sunday Tribune, described the proposed legislation as "a very significant" development.

"Given the massive increases in population on the west side of Dublin . . . for example, the Adamstown development which will add 30,000 people to the area over the next four years . . . without a further change in 2011, Dublin MidWest would be as under-represented then as Dublin North and Dublin West, the two constituencies that triggered the High Court challenge, are now, " he said.