Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I wish to return to the legal point. I interrupted the Minister of State to make the point that Commonwealth citizens in Britain have the right to vote in European Parliament elections at the moment. A citizen of Australia living in Britain can vote in European Parliament elections, even though one is not a citizen of a member State. In order to explain the legal basis of that, they refer to the European Court of Justice's 2004 judgment on Gibraltar and Aruba, although neither of which are this scenario exactly. It noted:

as regards the possible existence of a clear link between citizenship of the Union and the right to vote and stand for election which requires that that right be always limited to citizens of the Union, no clear conclusion can be drawn in that regard from Articles 189 EC and 190 EC, relating to the European Parliament, which state that it is to consist of representatives of the peoples of the Member States. The term ‘peoples’, which is not defined, can have different meanings in the Member States and languages [...] no principle can be derived from them that citizens of the Union are the only persons entitled under all the other provisions.

That goes back to the fundamental political point. Deputy Darragh O'Brien is correct to say that the UK has voted to leave and they cannot have their cake and eat it. However, I am not talking about British people who live in Britain having the right to elect British representatives to the European Parliament, I am talking about British people who live in Ireland having the right to elect representatives from Ireland to the European Parliament. It seems to me that is a question of democracy. These are people who live in the EU, in Ireland, they are affected by the laws of the EU, on which the European Parliament plays some, relatively limited, unfortunately, role in crafting. Therefore, they should continue to have the right to have an input into that process by having the right to stand for election and having the right to vote in European elections. That is where the question of democracy comes in. We should not discriminate against any non-EU citizens in terms of not having the right to vote in European Parliament elections. There seems to be no clear legal basis for doing so and in this particular case the situation arises that if we were not to make these amendments and the UK did exit, then British citizens living in Ireland would continue to have the right to vote in European elections, which I think would be a good thing. Therefore, I oppose the amendments. Regarding the approach that says they should not have voted to leave and that these are the consequences, they do not have to be the consequences. We can continue to say that British citizens who live in Ireland have the right to vote in European elections. That would be a good thing to do and what we should be in favour of in terms of the rights of Irish and other EU nationals living in the UK after Brexit.

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