Mr. David Garrahy:

I thank the Senators for their questions. On young people's participation and voting, one could look at referendums where young people have been facilitated to vote at an earlier age. Take the example of the Scottish independence referendum in which 80% of 16 and 17 year olds voted. It was a significant amount. It is interesting how they did it in Scotland. They did not just drop it on the heads of 16 and 17 year olds. They included schools and youth groups and they built knowledge and held debates between young people to look at both sides of the issues. When it came to the vote, 16 and 17 year olds felt empowered and enabled to vote and make a strong decision for the future of their country and their lives. One could see a certain joy among these voters where they felt so empowered and worthy because this task had been given to them for their first vote. That is the spirit with which we need to engage young people. Young people are incredibly idealistic, or more accurately, they are not incredibly idealistic but maybe more idealistic than previous generations. Their interest in politics is about enabling the human rights of their friends, families and co-citizens, ensuring there is no discrimination, making sure that marginalised groups are being taken care of. They go on the streets to campaign for this. That is the kind of idealism that we have to capture and bring in to the system somehow while also going to the places where young people are active politically. That is online, where there are huge political debates in which young people engage and through petitions.

These are areas where traditional structures of politics do not engage a great deal. A change needs to happen from both sides. It is something that I have been trying to do through the European Youth Forum regarding the 2019 European elections, where we are trying to first bring young people to where politics is happening through elections and try to have more young candidates and lower the voting age; and, second, bring politicians and active politics to where young people are debating it, whether this is in their youth groups, online, on the streets, and try to get that conversation going. My organisation and I believe voting at 16 is extremely important but it cannot be done without good citizenship education in schools and in youth clubs that prepares young people to take this big step of voting for the first time. Studies in Austria and other countries that have implemented this have shown that once students vote in their first election, and vote earlier, that they will continue to vote in subsequent elections because they feel that empowerment and they have made a conscious choice which is very important.

On Irish citizens and their rights to access EU programmes, an EU citizen will always be able to access EU programmes by the fact that they are citizens of an EU country.

The problem with programmes such as ERASMUS is that whether a student's university is structurally set up to participate in a programme has a big bearing on students' potential participation in it. The big risk is that if ERASMUS or similar programmes are suspended for the UK, universities there will not offer these opportunities any more to their students because it is not beneficial and most of their students will not be EU citizens. Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland may not have those opportunities because their universities will not take part in ERASMUS or facilitate this type of cross-Border co-operation. It was very revealing that following the Swiss referendum three years ago that put limits on free movement between the EU and Switzerland, one of the first actions of the European Commission was to suspend ERASMUS co-operation with Switzerland. As a result, no Swiss student or organisation has been able to participate in ERASMUS since. It is very linked with free movement. The European Commission said that if there was to be no free movement, there would be no ERASMUS. The risk is that if freedom of movement becomes an issue in the negotiations between the EU and the UK, the EU may follow the Swiss precedent and automatically suspend ERASMUS for the UK, which would have a huge impact on young people there.