Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Government is running away from this issue. The letter I quoted from earlier is dated 30 September 2014. It is very clear that all the rhetoric, lip service and tea and sympathy delivered in Liverpool, Manchester, London, New York, Boston, Sydney or Brisbane amounts to a con on the part of the Government. It is an utter disgrace.

The Constitutional Convention recommended that the right to vote in the presidential election be extended to citizens of the North who are full Irish citizens and to the diaspora, to people forced out of this country. Mr. Jimmy Deenihan, to his credit, in the letter to An Taoiseach on that occasion said, "For those who feel that the State failed them and forced them to emigrate, this offers an opportunity to rebuild trust and to look to the future." How is trust to be established when it is so clear that Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will do a lot of talking on this issue and make a lot of promises but fail to act and, even worse, block the action required to give this basic right to those citizens? Could it be that the biggest impediment is the fear that those forced out of this country because of Fine Gael's incompetence and that of its colleagues in Fianna Fáil might, from a distance, deliver an electoral verdict that the Government is not keen on?

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