Should Irish citizens in NEI be allowed to vote in the presidential election? Weeeelllll…

A bit like the shark in the movie Jaws, the question of extending voting rights in Ireland’s Presidential elections has raised its head again.

It’s a modest proposal, just as the office of President of Ireland is a modest post. I mean modest in the sense that the President is not supposed to intervene in politics. Good idea: just like the Queen of England didn’t get into every political spat over the decades of her reign, likewise Irish Presidents are supposed to float on a pink cloud, safely above and free from the kick and gouge of everyday politics.

I said ‘supposed’. Because in practice, the President of Ireland time and again gets into political matters. In recent times (well, recentish), President Mary Robinson opened the door to Sinn Féin with her ‘chance’ encounter and handshake with  Gerry Adams. President Mary McAleese organised Orange shindigs in Aras An Uachtairan every Twelfth, while her husband played golf (I kid you not) with loyalist ex-paramilitaries such as Jackie McDonald.And President Michael D Higgins hasn’t minded weighing in on the side of the persecuted Palestinians and pointing the finger at Israel and all who condone genocide.

So you’d think that a discussion of extending votes for the Irish president to the people of NEI would be a relatively uncontroversial affair. I mean they could have asked for Presidential votes for all Irish citizens across the world.

Red-hot controversial is what it really is. The voices of Claire Hanna, Malachi O’Doherty, Sammy from the TUV and David from the DUP (or was it the other way round?)  were raised on Talkback, banging noisily ino each other as the modest proposal was discussed.

I don’t have to get a promise you won’t start swearing uncontrollably if I were to tell you that Sammy and David were very much agin votes for Nordies. An assault on the Good Friday Agreement, another step down the slippery path to an independent and united Ireland, no thanks, no thanks, NO THANKS.  Malachi said that giving the vote to Irish people in NEI would, oddly, delay the day of a united Ireland, not hasten it. He figures that cautious nationalists would be satisfied with that and ease off the pressure for a united Ireland.  Claire Hanna was her usual good-humoured self, saying that Irish citizens living in Ireland very obviously should be able to vote for the President of Ireland.

Either David or Sammy or maybe both thought that extending the vote to the Irish diaspora  throughout the world would be better, since that would make it less obviously an assault on the integrity of the United Kingdom. Something like that.

Every time this comes up – and it has been coming up for decades now – I find myself somewhat conflicted.

Why? Because the President of Ireland plays a negligible role in Irish politics (usually), and yet is very well paid, lives in a huuuuge house with ninety-two rooms, and has servants and flunkeys attending to their every desire. It seems an odd thing for two or five or maybe just one person to be rattling around in a mansion the size of Aras An Uachtarain, while thousands of people are sleeping on the streets of Dublin and elsewhere,  and the housing situation in the southern state has tens of thousands of young and not-so-young people unable to buy a house.

That said, I think Sammy and David are right to smell a rat. They think all of the island /Ireland voting would give people a taste for all-Ireland voting, which they just might start clamouring for, citing the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Even more important, it  would breach the wall that the South has erected  and tens of thousands of votes would come flooding into what at present is a South-only issue.  It might even result in the election of a Sinn Féin President of Ireland.  It certainly would heighten the awareness of Southern politicians that adding the North to the mix could and almost certainly would present them with an appalling vista. Which is? That Ireland would be a transformed place and the century-long grip of FF and FG on things political would have been broken.

But how could this be, seeing as the President of Ireland transcends, floats above politics?  Because the only people who are more quietly hysterical about an all-Ireland than the northern unionists are southern politicians.  It’d leave their whole cosy century-old grip on power at the mercy of a northern hammer-on-fingers. 

D’you remember when ‘One man, one vote’ sounded like a really good slogan? Ssshhh. David and Sammy, Simon and Micheál  would rather have the entirety of Ireland made into a McDonald golf course.