Dr. Adrian Kavanagh:

Yes, less than 1%. It might have been higher. It might have been the case that it is annual registration. This would have been after the British general election with the expectation that another election would not come up for another four years. The society knows that 40,000 registration forms were downloaded during the election year, which was the year before, so I suspect it might be higher in election years in the UK but that is still a very small percentage registering to vote let alone deciding to turn out to vote.

In the case of Italy, 3.5 million Italian expatriates were registered to vote in the last election but roughly one-third voted. It was estimated that just over one million voted in elections to the Chamber of Deputies and under 1 million voted in the contest for the Senate so we are looking at a turnout rate of roughly 30% in Italy.

Croatia is an interesting example. It is one country where one finds divergences or variances in voting rights, which the EU is concerned about. Croats living in Bosnia-Herzegovina have the right to vote in two national elections. They can vote in the Bosnian national elections but they can also vote in the Croatian elections. This, of course, taps into what is the big issue for the EU, namely, the fact that there are different voting rights for different Europeans. Irish people living in other EU countries do not have the right to vote in general elections. Obviously, Bosnia-Herzegovina is not in the EU but a Bosnian Croat can vote in an election in Croatia which is now in the EU. If one is a Bosnian Croat, one can vote in two general elections. It is these differences that seem to go against the principle of what it means to be part of the EU. A 22% turnout was estimated for the diaspora population of Croatia in the 2007 election. In the last parliamentary election in Croatia, the turnout was as low as 5%.

If one is trying to consider what impact diaspora voters might have in elections, one element to take account of is the likely turnout level. Ireland is an interesting case because of our electoral system. If one decides to extend voting rights to the diaspora, there are different ways one can decide to do it. Does it extend to the Irish diaspora living in other European countries or to all countries across the world? One could do what Croatia and Italy have done and have a separate constituency electing a number of seats. Obviously, in the case of Dáil Éireann, that could have an impact because as we know from the past, most Governments, excluding the current one and the 1992-1994 one, enjoy very narrow majorities. There might be the fear that if results turn out a certain way in the emigrant or diaspora constituency, it would dictate who forms the next Government.

The other way of extending voting rights is the model used in the UK. This involves allowing voters to vote in the constituency they come from or where their parents came from in the case of the UK. We have high levels of marginality when it comes to Irish elections because of our electoral system. As members know, a couple of hundred votes can determine the last seats in a number of constituencies.

I did a quick number crunch to examine the impact of extending voting rights to the Irish diaspora at the last general election on general election constituencies in 2011. I took the same scenario that pertains in Canada or Australia - a scenario preferred by many in the academic literature. It involves extending voting rights to diaspora populations for five or six years and after that, the right to vote in national elections is taken over by the country in which they reside. I used the population estimates published by the census last year and applied them to likely turnout levels. Emigrant populations tend to be younger than the average population and younger populations tend to be less likely to vote. Looking at the number of people who left Ireland in the five years prior to the general election and making allowances for the fact that a significant number of people might have left in 2006 and 2007 and might have returned by 2009 or 2010, I produced an estimate of likely turnout again making allowances for the fact that based on the CSO's figures, a very high percentage of emigrants tend to be in the younger age cohorts and younger people are less likely to vote. I estimated that there might have been a total valid vote of just over 32,000 among the diaspora population at the last election assuming the turnout levels for that group were the same as those for the population at home, which is a big assumption. One could ask what would have happened if it was 30%, as is the case in Italy, or 5%. Even with these figures, when one looks at the last election and divides that potential voting population of 32,000 across what were then 43 constituencies in the State-----