Catherine Connolly’s presidential election campaign would be a stroll to the park if Ireland honoured all its citizens’ rights. Instead, the Independent candidate is being accused of lip service by two parties that have ensured the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of potential voters from choosing their head of state.
Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland are allowed no say in an election that is being billed as crucial to their future constitutional status. Sinn Féin insists the next president must “champion a united Ireland”. Fine Gael says its candidate, Heather Humphreys, as a Presbyterian from a Border county, would symbolically unite the island. Fianna Fáil presents its candidate, Jim Gavin, as being Border-blind due to his involvement with the all-island GAA. Yet those living in the North’s six counties are silenced in the election. Their continuing exclusion reduces them to nominal citizens.
Addressing his party’s annual conference last weekend, DUP leader Gavin Robinson rebuked the Republic for what he called its “institutional intolerance of Protestant culture and heritage” but the southern State’s starker prejudice is against its own citizens in the North. Under the 1956 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act, affirmed by the 1998 Belfast Agreement, people in Northern Ireland are entitled to choose to be citizens of Ireland. As such, the Irish President is their president. Ever since Mary Robinson’s election to the Áras in 1990, the office’s holders have striven to represent them with their presence and their utterances. But across the Liffey in Government Buildings the realpolitik means that extending voting rights to Northern citizens would be electoral hara-kiri, virtually handing Sinn Féin the presidency on a plate.
Sinn Féin, Connolly’s major backer, is the biggest party in Northern Ireland and the biggest all-island one. It got 250,388 first-preference votes in the most recent Assembly elections in May 2022. On a crude calculation, if you add the SDLP’s 78,237, Aontú’s 12,777 and, conservatively, a third of both the Alliance Party’s 116,681 votes and People Before Profit’s 9,798, you get more than 380,000 potential active ethnonationalist voters in the North in 2022. While some – particularly SDLP voters – might back Fianna Fáil, they would be a proportion of a larger turnout than the 63.6 per cent three years ago, attracted to polling stations by the unprecedented opportunity to cast their preference for president. Northerners have a vested interest in an election portrayed as seminal for the abolition of partition. Unlike voters in the rest of the island, the constitutional status is a priority issue with some voters in the North. Respondents there ranked it third, behind cost of living and healthcare, in a survey conducted last year by researchers at the University of Liverpool.
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Denying legions of potential voters the right to choose their first citizen is an extreme exercise in gerrymandering. This continuing snub to our compatriots shrinks the winner’s mandate. Outsiders might presume it to be an Irish joke that Rostrevor resident Mary McAleese could not cast a vote for herself when she won the 1997 election. Once the Irish Government-funded Narrow Water Bridge over Carlingford Lough is completed, the journey from Rostrevor to Omeath in the Republic will be less than five miles.
The delaying by successive governments in enfranchising Irish citizens in Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh and Tyrone evokes Ronnie Corbett.
He made a plea to his mother that he wanted to marry and pass on his genes and she replied that she had given them to Oxfam – such was her determination to keep her 42-year-old son under her roof as a half-fledged adult. In 2017, during the Brexit negotiations, then taoiseach Leo Varadkar promised that “no Irish government will ever again leave Northern nationalists and Northern Ireland behind”. Yet four years earlier, a constitutional convention had recommended that a referendum be held to extend presidential voting rights. An Oireachtas Bill providing for such a referendum in 2019 turned out to be fiction. As an anonymous wag once scribbled on Samuel Beckett’s headstone in Montparnasse Cemetery, “we’re still waiting”.
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Belfast woman Emma de Souza was hailed as something of a national hero when she successfully sued the British government to establish her right to be considered Irish from birth. Yet, unless she has since registered to vote in the Republic as a resident, she is prohibited from participating in picking her president. A commitment to extend voting rights in presidential elections was contained in the 2020 programme for government but it has been dropped from the current one. In another country, this would be at least as topical during the election campaign as is the nominations requirement to be a contestant, about which there has been much olagóning. The silence is indicative of a news media that, by and large, treats Sinn Féin with deep suspicion. While it may be an understandable attitude among those in the South who remember the horrors of the Troubles, it is indefensible to refuse Irish citizens in the North who lived through it their right to vote for their president. Parity of esteem is the foundation principle of the Belfast Agreement but, when it comes to electing a president, there is no equal regard for Irish citizens living on this island.
The political establishment’s double standard is so ingrained it seems unaware of it when accusing Connolly of being a latecomer to the ideal of Irish unification. During a Dáil debate on Brexit in 2020, she said: “If anything comes out of [it], I hope it will be a reunited Ireland by peaceful means.” That and other of her comments on the topic are too awkward for her critics to mention while they use Northern Ireland as a weapon to damage her campaign. Ditto her comment about Hamas being part of Gaza’s fabric and the right of Palestinians to self-determination. Unpalatable perhaps, but true. Had the same truth not been acknowledged about the IRA, there would not have been a peace process. There would be no Belfast Agreement.
While these political grenades get flung around in the Republic, Irish citizens who lived with the reality in Northern Ireland are forced to sit silently and watch as mere spectators. It is wrong.
