Gormley to discuss lower voting age

MINISTER FOR the Environment John Gormley is due to meet the National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) next month to discuss its proposal to allow 16-year-olds to vote.

NYCI member Maria Kelly told the Oireachtas committee on the constitution that the electoral registration system needed to be changed to make it easier for young people to vote.

“The reason so many young people aged 18 don’t get added to the register is that they are moving away from home to go to college, training or work and fall between the administrative cracks,” Ms Kelly said.

“A practical benefit of the vote at 16 would be that it would make the electoral registration system much easier. Most young people aged 16 are still in school and can be easily added to the register.”

She said a report compiled by the NYCI last year found over 73 per cent of young people believed online voting would be an important measure in encouraging voter participation.

She outlined the organisation’s “Vote at 16 – a New Age in Voting” campaign to the committee. “We are meeting with Minister Gormley in February and are looking forward to discussing the issue in detail,” she said.

Union of Students in Ireland (USI) president Peter Mannion said some students below the current voting age of 18 felt they were not represented in the “halls of power”.

There was a sense of being kept “at arms’ length” from important issues such as the National Asset Management Agency (Nama), he added.

Prof Jonathan Tonge of the University of Liverpool’s department of politics said the Labour government in Britain was divided on whether or not to allow 16-year-olds to vote. It would be interesting to see if a related proposal was contained in the party’s manifesto ahead of the next general election in the UK, he said.

The Austrian ambassador to Ireland, Dr Walter Hagg, said his country was one of the first European states to enact legislation permitting 16 year olds to vote.

Dr Hagg said most analysis after the elections of September 2008 came to the conclusion that voter turnout among 16-18-year-olds was roughly as high as the average, which he said was 77 per cent.