Paudie Coffey (Waterford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Will will talk about that another day.

There are different views on the proposal before the House to lower the age at which citizens are eligible for election to the Office of the President. Some are of the view that we should leave well enough alone by retaining the age requirement of 35 years, while others have suggested we should be even more ambitious by lowering the age requirement to 18. The Government is proposing in this Bill to lower the age requirement to 21, matching the age requirement for standing for election to the Dáil, Seanad and European Parliament. It will only be possible to gauge the impact of the change over time, if the Bill is passed and subsequently approved by referendum. It is to be welcomed that we are taking steps to deal with the proposal to lower the age requirement in order to be eligible for the Office of President. We are all too familiar with the many fine reports on constitutional issues on which no actions were taken. I referred earlier to the work of the Constitution Review Group and the all-party Oireachtas committee on the issue of lowering the age requirement. Their recommendations lay dormant until the issue was aired again by the Constitutional Convention some 14 years later. We are finally giving the people an opportunity to have their say and the referendum will settle the matter for the foreseeable future.

If the Bill is passed and approved by the people by way of referendum, it will have a significant impact on the number of citizens who will become eligible for the Office of President. Based on the population figures from the last census, some 2.27 million people, or nearly 50% of the population, were aged 35 and over. Some 3.27 million, or 71%, were aged 21 or over. On the basis of these figures, some 1 million additional people in the State, or more than 21% of the population, will become eligible for election to the Office of President if this proposal is accepted by the people. That is a significant increase in the number of eligible citizens and reflects the fact that this is an important proposal that is being put to the people for decision in May.

However, there has been some unwelcome commentary to the effect that the referendum proposal is not substantial. It has been suggested that rather than progressing the referendum on the candidacy age of the President, the Government should be addressing some of the other recommendations made by the Constitutional Convention. We should bear in mind that under the Constitution, the President takes precedence over all other persons in the State. A President is required to make significant decisions, as referred to by many Senators, on issues such as the referral of a Bill to the Supreme Court and the dissolution of the Dáil.Taking these facts into consideration the proposal to reduce the age at which a citizen becomes eligible for election to the Office of President must be seen as significant. I am not trying to diminish the importance of the other recommendations that have emerged from the convention. We should acknowledge that all the other issues on which recommendations have been made are serious issues with implementation implications that need to be weighed up and analysed carefully. Neither am I saying that the Government has not progressed these other recommendations. The impression is sometimes conveyed that the Government is not responding or is ignoring these. That is not the case.

If the Bill is passed and approved by the people in a referendum it will make a significant change to eligibility for election to the Office of President as originally envisaged by the architects of the Constitution. The lowering of the age requirement from 35 to 21 will mean that a wider range of citizens will be eligible for election to this high office. It will also mean alignment of age requirements to stand for President, the Houses of the Oireachtas and the European Parliament. The Government has committed to holding two referendums in May, one on the proposal in the Thirty-Fourth Amendment of the Constitution (Marriage Equality) Bill 2015, which was passed in this House last Friday, and the other which is the subject of the present Bill. I understand that if either or both of these proposals are accepted by the people Ireland’s Convention on the Constitution will be the first ever citizen assembly of its type to produce bona fide constitutional change. I thank the Senators for their contributions.