You know that really annoying thing social media sites do, where they keep updating their interface and fiddling with things that worked perfectly well before, and won’t just leave well enough alone for five minutes?
Well, the Irish government apparently works off the same principle. Except instead of a website, it’s the Irish constitution, and instead of an update, it’s a proposed referendum seemingly every 45 minutes.
The latest planned crusade, as reported in the Independent: “Referendum to allow Irish diaspora vote for president to take place before 2024”
The piece explains:
The article goes on to state that this will be available to “Irish-born” citizens living abroad. This means there would be around a million people living around the world who could vote for the Presidency by post from the safety of Canada, or America or Australia.
Now, why is this significant?
Well, firstly, because you’ll suddenly have a massive cohort of people voting who have little to no stake in the consequences if things go horribly wrong. On principle, this is just generally a horrible idea for any voting system.
Obviously if someone lives here, they’ll have to think long and hard about how they vote. The outcome of the election will impact their life directly, so it’s in their own self-interest to give it some thought.
More importantly, they can see firsthand the effects of the current policies in their day-to-day existence. If things are going badly, they may factor that in and decide to vote for someone different this time around. They are fully invested in the process.
By contrast, someone living abroad likely has a much more hazy idea of what conditions are like within the country, and, if they elect the wrong person who makes the problem worse, it doesn’t impact them at all. They can vote by post from thousands of miles away, and continue happily living out their days in the UK, or the States, or Australia, having unwittingly condemned their countrymen to 7 years of misery.
You might say “Ah yeah, but it’s only the presidency. Sure, that’s just a ceremonial role, it doesn’t even matter.”
But in fact, it absolutely does matter, as Covid demonstrated.
Through all the lockdown measures, which many people believed to be unconstitutional, how many times did you hear about this or that person trying to raise vast sums of money for a High Court challenge?
From Tracey O’Mahony, to Il Viccolo, to Declan Ganley – all these private citizens and businesses had to scrape together whatever resources they had personally and fight to have their day in court.
Even if you supported the lockdown measures, and think they were perfectly justified and legal, it’s undeniable that the restrictions were a major, unprecedented step for our country. You should want the courts to at least look at it and confirm that yes, these measures were acceptable.
And yet, our President, Michael D. Higgins, did not at any stage refer this legislation to the courts to have it examined, which is the President’s duty and right. He signed everything that was put in front of him, and ordinary punters were left to fight to have the laws scrutinised.
This should never have happened, and it wouldn’t have happened if we had a good president.
Not to mention, in war time, the President is the Supreme Commander of the Irish Defence Forces. This, in light of Ukraine and rumours of World War 3, is a lot more relevant now than it might have seemed 6 months ago.
These points, among others, are why the role of president is not merely ceremonial. It is actually vitally important. And those who vote for the president should also have to live under the consequences of their choice.
Another consideration is the disadvantage that this policy would cause for smaller presidential candidates.
If there are a million eligible voters overseas, that’s a million voters that can only be advertised to if you have massive resources to run international ad campaigns.
The only groups who have that kind of money are the big political parties or those with significant corporate backing, meaning small independent candidates would effectively be screwed.
Even aside from the merits of this issue itself, it’s actually not healthy for our society to have referendum every couple of years. The constitution is supposed to be a solid bedrock upon which our entire legal system and fundamental rights rest.
If it must change, it should change incredibly slowly and infrequently in moments of dire need – not on a whim every time some inane idea pops into a politician’s head while he’s in the shower singing Dua Lipa.
The government needs to stop faffing about and needlessly fiddling with major issues they clearly haven’t thought through.