Theresa Reidy: Ireland unusual for not letting citizens abroad vote
Polish people living in Ireland queue at the Polish Embassy in Dublin to vote in Poland's snap parliamentary election, 2007. Photo: Niall Carson PA
The appearance of Conor McGregor in the White House on St Patrick’s Day brought Ireland’s relationship with its diaspora community back onto the public agenda.
McGregor’s declarations about becoming a presidential election candidate are disconnected from the constitutional realities of how someone becomes a candidate. McGregor will not secure the backing of 20 Oireachtas members or four councils, and that is the end of his presidential notions.
There are no serious calls to reform the presidential nomination routes. Nomination procedures come onto the political agenda every presidential cycle but in practice most candidates with substantial political and community profiles have been able to secure nominations.
However, who gets to vote at presidential elections has been given attention and a proposal to hold a referendum to allow Irish citizens resident outside the state to vote in presidential elections has been mooted several times since 2011. Indeed, Ireland is unusual in not providing voting rights for its citizens living abroad.
Known as external voting rights or non-resident citizen voting, most EU member states, and most states around the world, provide voting rights for their citizens living outside the state. We often see media coverage of lines at embassies and consular offices here in Ireland as French, Polish and Portuguese citizens participate in elections in their home countries.
Non-resident citizen voting rights became a low-key political issue in the 1990s. Several advocacy groups formed to advocate for political rights for emigrants and a proposal to have emigrants represented in the Seanad was debated as far back as 1996.
The issue received little public attention until the great recession in 2008 and Ireland’s economic woes brought a renewed focus on the economic potential of the diaspora. A new generation of politically active emigrants was also created by the recession.
The Fine Gael-Labour government elected in 2011 referred non-resident citizen voting rights to the Constitutional Convention which endorsed a proposal to allow Irish citizens (passport holders) living abroad to vote in presidential elections. This reform requires a referendum.
Several commitments about the timing of the referendum were given but the referendum never materialised. The referendum proposal was included in the 2020 programme for government between Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green Party but the covid-19 pandemic interrupted the early plans to hold it.
The proposal also has strong support from opposition parties, with Sinn Féin in particular advocating for it. The political reform section of the current programme for government is small and referendums are conspicuously absent.
All of which means that the promises of voting reform have amounted to little, non-resident citizens will not have a vote in October and in fact they are highly unlikely to have a vote for the next presidential election either.
This political reality is largely uncontroversial with the resident population, most of whom are in no way animated by the question of votes for emigrants. The Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Green coalition lost two referendums in March 2024 with spectacular sized No votes.
Like many referendums before, what appeared to be fairly uncontentious proposals with majority support were transformed in the active campaign period and soft ‘Yes’ support evaporated. There is potential for exactly the same dynamic to happen with a referendum on voting rights for non-resident citizens.
MobilEU was a project that in part explored attitudes to non-resident citizen voting rights. Ireland was included in the study and our data from 2022 showed that there was broad support for extending voting rights to non-resident citizens among a representative sample of Irish citizens.
Up to 57% of respondents agreed that ‘citizens living outside the state should have the right to vote’. However, when we explored more detailed aspects of non-resident voting, we found that there were areas of concern among respondents especially in relation to the integrity of how voting would be conducted and more significantly in relation to a potential ‘swamping’ effect.
Swamping is the term used to describe the possibility that voters outside the state might have an outsized effect on the outcome of an election. 42% of voters agreed with the statement that ‘non-resident citizens should not be allowed to vote in elections, because a large group of non-resident citizen voters may have a substantial impact on the outcome of the elections’ while 37% disagreed.
These are very tight margins for an issue that has not received a lot of general discussion. The margin in support of the proposal could easily be whittled down in a campaign, especially if a government approached it in the sloppy manner.
It is important to say that non-resident voters would have to hold Irish passports. In fact, a great many of the non-resident voters that would be enfranchised would have been born in Ireland, and the single biggest cluster would be in Northern Ireland.
Furthermore, the major lesson from research on non-resident voting is that it is very difficult to get external citizens to register and vote, and evidence of swamping is in fact quite limited.
But without a serious and sustained effort to explain these points, the referendum could be lost. And in that case, not having the referendum at all might be the better option.
- Dr Theresa Reidy is a political scientist at University College Cork. The MobilEU project was funded by the European Union’s [Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020)]. Grant number: 963348.
