Sir, – Geraldine Bird’s letter (Letters, April 13th) really misses the point and shows no understanding of the issue regarding voting rights for Irish citizens abroad.
Ms Bird argues that “those with Irish connections” should not have the vote because nearly half of “white Catholics..., many of whom are Irish-American” voted for Donald Trump, because Trump supporters Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany and Sean Patrick Hannity are Irish-Americans, and because Friends of Sinn Féin collected more than $1 million in 2022.
These arguments are entirely specious.
In a democracy, you can’t decide who gets to vote based on who they vote for. And excluding people who donate money to Sinn Féin would disqualify a lot of the present electorate in the State. But these are distractions.
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The issue is not whether US-born US citizens like Bannon and company should be able to vote in Ireland, but whether Ireland should give the vote to its own Irish citizens living abroad.
This has long been the norm among our democratic European partners and neighbours.
Even former Eastern bloc states allow their citizens living abroad to vote – witness the queues of Polish voters outside their Dublin embassy on election days.
In not allowing citizens abroad to vote in Irish elections, Ireland continues to keep company with the likes of Zimbabwe.
In this regard, Ireland is still a long way behind the liberal European democracies we like to count ourselves among. – Yours, etc,
KEVIN McCAFFERTY,
Tertnes
Norway.