I like to think (others may differ) that it’s rare enough that Ben Scallan gets one over on me, but he did yesterday. In the morning, it transpired that the Social Democrats were advancing a private members motion with a view to holding a referendum reducing the Irish voting age to 16. “Is this a story?”, asked Ben. “No”, I said, “that one will go absolutely nowhere”.
Technically of course I was correct: The Soc Dem bill will go absolutely nowhere. But Ben to his credit decided to double-check and ask the Taoiseach about it, and of course Micheál Martin, being endlessly afraid of irritating the youth, gave this answer:
Speaking to Gript outside Government Buildings on Tuesday morning ahead of the day’s cabinet meeting, the Taoiseach said the idea would be given “serious consideration.”
“I’ve always been open-minded in respect of that,” he said.
“I don’t have an issue with reducing it to 16. We will give that serious consideration, we’ll engage in the debate. But we don’t have any timeline for that.”
When asked if he would rule out such a referendum within the lifetime of the current Government, Martin responded: “I wouldn’t rule anything out in that regard.”
Why wouldn’t he rule it out? It is, after all, about the stupidest idea in politics.
We could make this case based on the contradictions alone: The age of sexual consent in Ireland is seventeen years old. The age at which one may legally purchase tobacco and alcohol is eighteen. The age at which one can seek election to the Dáil is twenty-one. The age at which your parents stop being given children’s allowance to cover the cost of your upbringing is nineteen. Our laws say that a sixteen-year-old is too immature to smoke, drink, have sex, or be financially independent. But there are those who wish to continue recognising all those immaturities while also declaring sixteen-year-olds adult enough to make decisions about who should be running the country and what Ireland’s stance on international affairs should be.
That is of course the argument that you make if you are on telly and want a good and respectable reason for denying sixteen-year-olds the vote. It should really be enough. But it is not the real reason that giving sixteen-year-olds the vote is the stupidest thing the country could do.
No, the real reason is that sixteen-year-olds would almost always be free vote the wrong way without consequence. The whole point of being a sixteen-year-old is that you are, in general, insulated from the consequences of your actions. Not only by your parents, but by the state: If you murder somebody at sixteen, you will be tried as a child and not an adult, and face a child’s punishment. You are provided for on the basis that you cannot look after yourself, both by your parents directly and the state indirectly. Large-scale unemployment does not directly impact a sixteen-year-old. Nor, frankly, would a war – into which they would not be conscripted. They do not as a general rule pay income taxes, and are therefore insulated from tax rises that they vote for. Nor (in the unlikely event they voted for it) would they be impacted by social welfare cuts or reductions in health spending.
There’s a reason that left-wing parties are very keen for sixteen-year-olds to vote, and that reason is that they fully expect that sixteen-year-olds would vote left wing in large numbers. They are right, precisely because of the paragraph above: When you do not have to pay for Utopia, you are free to vote for Utopia.
It should be no surprise then that the Soc Dems – whose entire corner of the political market is about selling a version of political utopia that would come about if only we were all nice people like the Soc Dems – should be in favour of sixteen-year-olds voting. But why on earth is Micheál Martin of all people open to it? Does he really think that the children of Ireland are lining up to vote for Fianna Fáil?
I do not think he does. I think instead that he believes himself to be kicking the idea into the long grass by suggesting that we’ll have a nice long think about it and give it due consideration and not rule anything out. In practical terms that means there’ll be no votes for sixteen year olds under this Government. But it also means that the most terrible idea in Irish politics lives to fight another day.
Let there be no doubt, this will be high on the agenda for the next left-wing Government, which is now a real possibility after the next election. Sinn Fein, Labour, the Greens, and the Soc Dems (along with People before Profit, even though they would never join such a Government) all know that votes at sixteen is to their personal partisan political benefit. That is why they support it.
But by not challenging them on those grounds, and by legitimising the idea now, Mr. Martin is doing their work for them. The ground for this is being sown. And those who oppose it – like Mr. Martin – need to oppose it muscularly and vociferously, before it is shunted on to an unsuspecting public in four or five years time without so much as a proper debate.