Resolving ‘a certain anomaly’ – If your old enough to vote, you should be old enough to stand for election

According to a report on Newstalk, Bertie Ahern is still looking to press ahead with a Children’s Rights referendum prior to the next election. Beyond the purely electoral, there isn’t any really good reason why this referendum should be held separate from the general election, but that really isn’t here or there. What is though, is that this referendum offers the chance for an often over-looked flaw in the Irish constitution to be rectified.

El Blogador carries a piece on the fact that currently those seeking election to the Northern Irish Assembly must be over 21 – something which is currently being looked at by Peter Hain. As El Blogador says;

It’s incongruous that someone of 18 could buy a house, pay rates and taxes, get married, vote and basically do everything else their fellow adults do, yet they have been unable to engage in the very core of democracy by being barred from standing in elections.

Quite.

Yet the situation is the same here for Dáil elections, and unlike in Northern Ireland, it can only be changed by a referendum. As I have harped on previously, when the decision was made thirty-odd years ago to reduce the voting age to 18, the failure to reduce the age at which people could enter the Dáil was not – not for any particularly strong reasoning, but rather as an oversight of sorts. As the then Junior Minister who introduced the legislation for the referendum said:

I agree that there is a certain anomaly in the concept of votes at 18 and young people not being entitled to seek election at that age.

This anomaly has survived for far too long. Whilst the argument can be made, as in the North, that this is not a particularly pressing issue, it is a matter which goes fundamentally to society’s appreciation of young people. As a society, we expect those aged 18 to 21 to behave in the same way as those over 21, yet at the same time, we refuse to allow those people the opportunity to represent us and legislate for us.

The forthcoming referendum offers the opportunity for this issue to be resolved, and possibly for the age limits on the Presidential office to be also discussed. Issues like this, which make practical, if only even theoretical, efforts to involve young people in decision making are in this author’s view, more likely to impact on the active participation of young people in politics than all the Rock the Vote initiatives one can imagine.