A Dehn surgery description of regular finite cyclic covering spaces of rational homology spheres

We provide related Dehn surgery descriptions for rational homology spheres and a class of their regular finite cyclic covering spaces. As an applicati on, we use the surgery descriptions to relate the Casson invariants of the covering spaces to that of the base space. Finally, we show that this place s restrictions on the number of finite and cyclic Dehn fillings of the knot complements in the covering spaces beyond those imposed by Culler-Gordon-L uecke-Shalen and Boyer-Zhang.