Opinion

Irish government ignoring concrete opportunity to maintain rights of EU citizens in the north

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar casts his vote in the presidential election
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar casts his vote in the presidential election Taoiseach Leo Varadkar casts his vote in the presidential election

THE Taoiseach confirmed on Friday in Derry that he intends to hold a referendum to extend voting rights for electing the president.

The plan is that the referendum will coincide with the vote for the European Parliament next May. That’s five years after the original proposal of the Constitutional Convention in 2013.

That proposal was scuppered by the Labour party, junior partners in Enda Kenny’s coalition. Labour feared that expanding the franchise to include the 1.73 million living abroad – most in the US – would mean a Sinn Féin president.

Enda Kenny, who did nothing for northern nationalists during his time as Taoiseach, but allowed the British government a free hand to sideline the Good Friday Agreement, agreed. He put the project on the long finger which guaranteed no vote for northerners, never mind Irish-Americans, until 2025. That’s where we are now.

The project got little traction during Liadh Ní Riada’s dreadful presidential election campaign where she made it one of her campaign issues, one of the many stupid decisions in her campaign. The Irish president has no legislative power and can therefore do nothing about who votes for a president. A president couldn’t even make a speech about the matter. It was pointless raising it. The electorate ignored the issue.

Far more urgent is the right of Irish citizens in the north, who are also automatically EU citizens, to vote in next year’s European election. That’s one of the many rights Irish citizens here will lose after 29 March. Yet Ní Riada missed a huge opportunity to make human rights, and the damage Brexit will do to them, the central item in her campaign.

Michael D Higgins has majored on human rights concepts in numerous speeches in the last seven years. In many ways it’s not a political matter. Who in Europe is going to object to the concept of human rights, apart from the DUP?

What is political however, is how they’re implemented and enforced. One central right of EU citizens is to vote in Euro elections and here the Irish government is in the process of letting down northern nationalists. The UK is losing its 73 MEPs next May and 27 have been allocated among 14 member states considered to be under-represented: Ireland got two.

There was an obvious chance to award the two to the north. The Irish government set the Constituency Commission to work. Sinn Féin submitted a proposal to give the north the two, and subsequently sent a legal opinion supporting their case. The Constituency Commission ignored them and awarded the extra seats to Dublin and Ireland South.

There’s no reason why the seats can’t allocated to the north. The Republic has one of the most restrictive voting systems in the world when it comes to citizens living outside the jurisdiction – as exemplified by the presidential election. Over 100 states around the world provide for voting rights of non-resident citizens; 74 per cent of EU states have such a provision, including Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. France has created eleven constituencies around the world for its citizens, Italy has four. Ireland none.

There’s obviously no EU rule to prevent the Republic following suit and it’s still not too late for the government to do so, for the recommendations of the Constituency Commission have to be ratified by the Oireachtas.

The UK has facilitated voting for other non-residents. For example, they used the Chinese Welfare Association offices in Belfast for Polish elections in 2010 and the Latvian consulate in Newry for Latvian elections in 2011. So there’s nothing in principle against facilitating EU elections here.

The only block is the Irish government which is loud in its protestations about defending the rights of Irish citizens in the north but so far has done nothing practical about it. Their position seems to be that they will take the matter up bi-laterally with the British after Brexit. Good luck with that. The ship will have sailed.

Here before them is a concrete opportunity to maintain the rights of EU citizens in the north which is legally entirely in the gift of the Irish government, yet they have ignored the case that has been presented to them.