Should Irish Emigrants have Votes? External Voting in Ireland

Abstract

Ireland is one of the few countries in Europe not to offer some form of suffrage to its citizens who live abroad permanently. By contrast, it has been a front-runner in the trend towards providing more liberal voting regimes for resident non-citizens, as since 1963 it has allowed all residents for the previous 6 months to vote and stand in local elections. This paper considers the normative case for and against external voting, the current comparative context of its increasing provision among European countries and the range of ways in which voting rights abroad combine with the extensibility of citizenship by descent abroad. Addressing the Irish case, it argues that there is no basis for a general right to vote for external citizens, but that, none the less, persisting connections and the rate of return migration give some reason to grant votes to first-generation emigrants, if differently weighted from those of resident citizens.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• voting rights
• Ireland
• emigrants
• demos
• subjection

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from helpful suggestions offered by Rainer Bauböck and other participants at the UCD Citizenship and Voting Rights in Europe, 3 December 2010.

Notes

By external citizens I refer to those permanently resident abroad. Citizens temporarily absent at election time present a simpler case, which can be accommodated with improved technology. Here I address only the principled normative grounds for external voting, not practical concerns, including security and cost, which are important in decisions about implementing such provisions. See International IDEA & IFE (2007).

Alternatively, Beckmann defines ‘affected’ as ‘affected by law’ in a way that comes close to the subjection view (Beckman, 2009).

Such ‘interests are genuinely political ones and emerge because individuals happen to be permanently dependent on, and jointly subjected to, established institutions of government that they can accept as legitimate if they are adequately represented in these institutions’ (Bauböck, 2009: 480).

External voting concerns not only global diasporas but also ‘kin-minorities’, blocs of co-nationals in a neighbouring state. The different considerations involved cannot be addressed in the space available here; it has been argued that, because of their potential impact on both states, full rights in their country of residence are more important (Bauböck, 2007: 2441). The issue of votes in Northern Ireland (with almost half a million Irish passport-holders by 2010) may be considered to fall into this category (MacDonald, 2010), but in view of the acknowledged right of those born in Northern Ireland to Irish citizenship, and the move to engage North and South in the Good Friday Agreement, itself passed on the basis of votes in both parts of the island, there may be a stronger claim for votes of some kind for Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland than in kin-states more generally. Chapter 5 of the 2002 Report of the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution discusses this at greater length than the issue of votes for emigrants, but concludes that there should not be any extension of voting beyond the state, and notes that the decision on emigrant votes is influenced in part by the desirability that both categories of citizen should be treated similarly.

Residents who will be more immediately exposed to the political decisions that they authorise through their vote have a qualitatively stronger claim to self-government than external citizens. This is why it is legitimate to differentiate external voting rights so that they reflect a presumptive strength of citizenship involvement and so that domestic residents cannot be outvoted (Bauböck, 2009: 488).

The countries considered are those included in the EUDO Citizenship research project on access to citizenship in Europe, available at: http://www.eudo-citizenship.eu

Malta allows external votes for some of those on public service outside the country. Greece has a constitutional provision for external votes, which has yet to be implemented. In Greece and Slovakia, those living abroad but present for the election can vote legally.

Although these were mainly in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina.

It can be argued that the pressure for votes for emigrants has been weakened by the fact that Irish people in Britain have automatically had a right to vote there and that they have also been politically successful in the USA, thus accounting for two primary emigration destinations. The voting rights in Britain are indeed peculiar to Ireland, but this does not explain why the large numbers of emigrants to the USA have not led to pressure for external votes, as in the case of Italy and Greece, for example.

For a sample of current views, see a thread on emigrant voting in the Political Reform.ie blog at http://politicalreform.ie/2010/07/29/votes-for-emigrants/, Global Irish.ie at http://www.globalirish.ie/2010/tracking-the-emigrant-voting-issue/ and the websites Amhran Nua at http://amhrannua.com/ and Charter for a New Ireland at http://tangibleireland.com/tangible-blog/blog/charter-for-new-ireland.html. See also http://ballotbox.ie/ for an emigrant internet poll carried parallel to the 2011 general election.

This does not prevent second-generation citizens establishing residence and regaining citizenship.