Ruairí Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I am very glad to have an opportunity to speak on this motion. It is straightforward. We all know that we need to facilitate far more people in the democratic process. Anybody who has been involved in elections over many years will know the issues that exist when somebody has to go on holiday and the difficulty of getting a postal vote. It is one of those things that is a lot easier to get in the North. We need to look at the whole issue of proxy voting. The electoral register is a complete mess. At least we have a fully functioning Electoral Commission at this point. I have no difficulty with the commission looking at the means by which people get on the presidential ballot. We probably need to look at how people get onto ballots in general. In Louth, we had almost 25 candidates at one stage. That make voting difficult for people. I accept that it cannot be made too easy but we need to facilitate as many people as possible. We have the means and time to do so. We can look at best practice across the world.

If we are going to talk about presidential elections, we must talk about the major failure that people are going out to vote for the President of Ireland while those in the North, whether in Newry, Crossmaglen, Culloville, Jonesborough, Dromintee, Cullyhanna, Silverbridge or one of the other places in the vicinity of where I live or whether in Belfast, Derry or even Cullybackey and Ballymena, are removed from the process. Responsibility for that lies with Government. It should not be a major shock. Fine Gael still presents itself as the united Ireland party and, while I will admit that it has had a number of spokespersons in the last while who have done some heavy lifting in this regard, I have not seen it at governmental level. I do not know how Fianna Fáil can stand over calling itself the republican party as Deputy Micheál Martin shushes us and tells us that now is not the time.

Many of us here would have been at the launch of former unionist Ben Collins's book, The Irish Unity Dividend, across the road. We all realise there is a financial dividend to be had from Irish unity. The scaremongering has been blown out of the water by the likes of John Doyle, Ulster University and DCU in one of many reports on the cost of Irish unity. Meeting that cost is well doable and will lead to economic gains for both North and South. It also presents an opportunity to deliver on a better Ireland but we have seen no element of planning. When asked about Deputy Martin's position, Ben Collins said that, if everyone says we have to wait until everyone gets on and every other issue is sorted, there will never be unity.

Those who are against it will just say we have not agreed. There is no conciliation and there is no reconciliation. It is an absolute failure of an argument. We need to deliver on Irish unity; it is as straight as that, but presidential voting rights for those in the North would be a first step.

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