Mary Hanafin recently said it would be “an insult to the office” if her party didn’t run a candidate for the presidential election later this year. While her antennae for injustice may be directly proportional to her interest in the job, I agree that “insult” is a good word to describe the upcoming election – but not because Fianna Fáil might sit it out. Rather, it looks like Irish citizens in Northern Ireland, and Irish citizens living abroad, will yet again be sidelined from electing the next president.
As someone from the Border, and resident in Scotland and therefore ineligible to vote, the fact that Ms Hanafin made her comments at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal, feels significant to me. Imagine three people who heard her statements live driving home after: one to Sligo, another to Strabane, while another visits family before driving to Derry Airport en route back to Glasgow. Three Irish citizens, all invested in Irish society, all driving about the same distance ... and only one of them will get to vote for their next head of state. Talk about insults.
Though we abroad and in the North are disenfranchised, it says more about the Republic than it does about us. This whole sorry situation is a greatest hits compilation of Irish politics: myopia and snobbery, inertia and benign neglect
Since 1990 we’ve had a Northern candidate in every presidential election, and a reliable part of campaigning since then has been pulling the big lever marked “diaspora heart strings”. And yet, we still have no say in choosing the person who comes to visit Irish cultural centres around the world, as eager voters in a candidate’s backyard over the Border can do nothing but cross their fingers.
What message was the lamp in the window of the Áras trying to convey exactly? “Don’t call us, we’ll call you?”
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Though we abroad and in the North are disenfranchised, it says more about the Republic than it does about us. This whole sorry situation is a greatest hits compilation of Irish politics: myopia and snobbery, inertia and benign neglect.
It’s not that our political parties aren’t fussed about the issue, it’s that they aren’t fussed enough. Sinn Féin and Aontú have brought it up, but they seem resigned to the fact there will be no change this time round: Sinn Féin’s idea of a win is a referendum on presidential polling day. Aontú is even less ambitious: the party appears to want to create a hierarchy of disenfranchisement by putting Northern citizens’ right to vote to the nation first. Other parties such as Fianna Fáil are happy to perpetuate the Kafkaesque ballet, floating candidates such as Deirdre Heenan who can’t vote for herself, while Fine Gael said it wouldn’t oppose a referendum, but it was all about timing. Would it help if we all chipped in to buy the Dáil a big clock?
This issue first got near the business end of decisiveness in 2013, at the constitutional convention. Despite two seminal referendums where the “Home to Vote” dimension was massive in the 2010s, it was kicked to touch in 2019 owing to Brexit, then floated off into space just when we should have locked in the expanded franchise to coincide with choosing President Michael D Higgins’s successor.
But no worries lads, we’ve got our finest minds on solving this by 2032. Maybe.
Our status as non-voters opens up huge logical gaps, let alone political ones. A Polish citizen living in Drogheda can vote for their president. A Brazilian citizen in Dundalk can vote for their president. But Irish citizens over in Newry or New York can’t vote for theirs? Nobody is suggesting the infrastructure to make this happen would be a quick build, but we are replete with global examples, and we’ve had more than a decade to follow them. But Irish politics is like the old excuse for not fixing the roof: it wasn’t a problem in sunshine, and it’s too wet to sort it now.
That Irish legislators have been inert on this for years is not surprising, but the snobbery among some commentators in the Republic is truly shameful. When it looked like a referendum might actually happen, we were subjected to mean-spirited diatribes from commentators who seemed to think Irish people abroad were so doe-eyed or doctrinaire we would vote for a bust of John Wayne from The Quiet Man – and, if they’re in the North, a bust with a balaclava over it. The same commentators also regularly invoked an old American revolutionary slogan in opposition, “no representation without taxation”, not appearing to realise they had the slogan the wrong way around. But yeah, we are the ignorant ones.
One pundit even had the gall to claim extending the franchise would “dilute” the electorate. Dilute! This, after the excruciating 2018 “Dragons’ Den” election, which we may as well have renamed Áras Got Talent. Given the incoherent sugar-rush campaigning style of a few candidates last time around, maybe the Republic’s solution needs to be less concentrated.
Wherever we are, whatever our voting status, this presidential election represents a big crossroads for us all: this election is a question of what we want Ireland to be in the next decade and beyond, and the answer affects Irish citizens in Enniskillen just as much as Ennis, Glasgow as much as Galway. To take just one issue, the next president will be supreme commander of a defence force that is contending with unprecedented forks in the road as regards its role in the world, and neutrality will surely be a hot topic in the election. But our voice on vital issues such as these stands to be muted at precisely the time Ireland and Irishness should be at its most pluralistic.
Unless the Government somehow speedruns something procrastinated on for a dozen years, the choosing of our most important symbolic dignitary in the world will just be another thing that happens to us. Irish citizens abroad and in the North stand by the Republic – but the Republic is driving right past.
Paddy Duffy is originally from Donegal but has been living in the UK since 2012 working as a TV producer.
