Voting rights for all citizens of Ireland

Irish people living abroad should of course have the right to vote in Presidential elections here.
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore started a new debate on this issue at the weekend when he said the matter was to be discussed at the all-party council on the Constitution.
I would go further than merely giving Irish people living abroad the right to vote in Presidential elections here. I would extend the right to Irish people living in Northern Ireland and I look forward to the day when our fellow citizens in Belfast, Derry and other parts of the North can vote in Dáil elections.
You could argue that people who do not pay their income tax here should not have the right to vote here but that would not be a valid argument. A lot of Irish people living here do not pay income tax here or any place else either because they cannot afford to pay it. The right to vote should not be confined to taxpayers.
Apart from that, Germany has far more control over the Irish economy and over the amount of tax we pay than the Irish people have and nobody is calling on the Government here to give voting rights in any election to the people of Germany.
It is good, however, to have a debate on this subject. Such a debate will inform us better and help people make up their minds on whether we should extend the franchise to all Irish people, no matter where they live.
I have my mind made up already and I come down firmly in favour of giving the vote to all Irish people of voting age, no matter where they live.
There are, as Eamon Gilmore pointed out, a number of problems to be ironed out before granting the right to vote to the Irish diaspora. The number of people belonging to the Irish diaspora is significantly higher than the number living inside the country.
Not all of the 70 million people belonging to the Irish diaspora would have Irish passports.
However, there should be some way of giving recognition to the Irish abroad and, in particular, to recent emigrants.
First and foremost, they should have Irish passports. Secondly, and this applies only to Irish living abroad and not to those living north of the border, they should have emigrated within a certain limited period, say, over the last two years, five years, 10 years or 20 years. Perhaps they should have visited home fairly often in the intervening years. These are details that should be worked on and changed, if necessary, with experience.
Thirdly, I think they should already have been registered to vote in Ireland and have voted in a previous election here. Several countries extend the right to vote to their citizens who live abroad. In France, 11 deputies to the National Assembly are elected from 11 overseas constituencies.
The President of Ireland does not have many statutory powers. He is merely a figurehead but he represents the Irish people, wherever they may be.
Voting in Dáil or local elections or in national referendums is a different matter and requires far more detailed consideration. So let us start with Presidential elections and see where we go from there.
I fail to understand why the Tánaiste made no reference to Irish people living in Northern Ireland when he spoke at the weekend about giving the right to vote to Irish people living overseas. The President of Ireland is the President of Ireland, not the President of the Republic of Ireland. So the people of Ireland should be entitled to have a say in who is going to be their President.
However, we do have a partitionist mentality here, whether we want to admit that or not. I fall into that trap myself at times when I say things like “the people of Ireland will be going to the polls tomorrow to elect a new government” or “householders all over the country are going to have to pay the new property tax”.
I am wrong on both counts. The people of Ireland would not be going to polls. Rather the people of the Republic would be voting. I am also confusing the “country” with the “State”. Although I try not to, I still sometimes make this mistake. The people of the North are ours too. Whether they come in with us or not is a matter for them.
Under the Good Friday Agreement, which is a legally binding international treaty, all citizens of Northern Ireland are entitled to an Irish passport. The choice is theirs and nobody can force them either way. The same should come to voting rights in respect of elections here.
Now it is not easy to persuade a lot of Irish citizens living in this jurisdiction to vote in any election. It would probably be far more difficult to get the Irish people in Northern Ireland who consider themselves British to vote in an election in the Republic but that should be a matter for them to decide. At present, they don’t have any choice.
I would love to see the day when all citizens of Northern Ireland – no matter what their politics or no matter what their religion – would have the right to elect TDs to the Dáil. If Ireland is ever united, Unionists as well as Nationalists will be represented in the Dáil.
We do not call our national parliament ‘Dáil Phoblacht na hÉireann’. We call it Dáil Éireann. The Government is the Government of Ireland and we do not refer to it as the ‘Government of the Republic of Ireland’. The Brits do, but that’s a separate matter.
Anyway, the question of representation for the diaspora and for the Northern Irish in the Dáil is one for the future. At present, we are thinking only of Presidential elections and the right of all Irish citizens, no matter where they live, to decide who takes up residence in Áras an Uachtaráin.