In recent weeks the Government has: extended child benefit to 18 year olds; moved to raise the smoking age to 21; and, in addition to that, proposed letting the very people it calls children too young to smoke or survive without child benefit vote at age 16. If you can make sense or logic out of that, you’re a smarter person than me.
The concept of letting people vote at 16 isn’t a new idea. In the last week of the 2020 general election, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin told a group of Transition Year students about his desire to see teenagers given the right to vote.
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