Dr. Adrian Kavanagh:

How to manage e-voting was the last matter I discussed. I take Deputy Durkan's point, in that voting should not be too easy, but voters also need to be facilitated. It is better to have as many people voting as possible instead of assuming that certain groups are better able to vote than others, and if the others do not make the extra effort to vote, hard luck. I disagree with that assumption. The more people voting, the stronger the democracy. I do not want to make voting too easy, but the more ways we can, within reason, help to facilitate voters, be they in our home country or among the diaspora, the better it will be not just for them, but for democracy at large. I have a different take from the Deputy.

My last point was on the Irish diaspora. Some of the academic literature suggests a cut-off of five to six years, by which time voting rights in national elections should be limited to the country of residence. It is an interesting suggestion and will be debated further as time passes. Nearly every European country has a different model. An approach has already been adopted by the EU in terms of environmental legislation. As the idea of creating equal conditions across the EU starts to weigh more on the issue of voting, I suspect that we might see a greater push from the Union for a homogenisation of the voting practices applied to overseas populations.

Deputy Byrne asked for whom the electorate should vote. This is where the problems lie. There would be the same type of electoral system that Ireland has. In a diaspora constituency of three seats, there would be a ballot paper showing Fianna Fáil candidate X, Fine Gael candidate Y, Labour candidate Z and possibly others. Unless we change the electoral system, this approach could raise constitutional issues and require another referendum, which is a route we do not want to take too often. That scenario is the probable one, although I am not a legal expert.