Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It showed how narrow and insular the thinking was on the voting at 16 legislation and how ridiculous some of the arguments were. However, I see a difference and a change since then, with many people being much more supportive of it. We need to move on it but the narrative is definitely beginning to change and people understand why it is so important.

I viewed the voting at 16 legislation through the prism of my life and how engaged I was at such an early age. I am not talking in the abstract about some potential 16-year-olds or young people of whatever age who might be in interested in politics. I am talking very much about my experience as a young person and how engaged and acutely aware I was of social injustice in particular. I view it very much from the perspective of my experience but also through the lens of social class.

Voter turnout is an issue in my community. The voting at 16 Bill and reducing the voting age to 16 could have a positive impact on voter turnout in some communities whose members do not see themselves as participating in politics and therefore disengage. If young people can engage in politics while still in school - politics is now on the curriculum and we can team those two up - and if a person is lucky enough to be 16 or 17 years old and in school while a general, local or European election is being held, the school community can very much get involved in the curriculum during those two years and build the students up to understand party politics, how to read manifestos and ask questions about what is involved in democracy and in EU politics. That can be widened to some groups in communities that do not have high voter turnout by getting them interested at a European level to think big. Many people in communities, as I know from my experience, struggle to see themselves as citizens. I struggled to see myself as an Irish citizen, never mind a European citizen, because I was living in a bubble in a microcosm in Tallaght which had its own politics but it is very much centred there. I now think how beneficial it would have been for me to have been in a concentrated space in school with other kids if the school had been involved in a voter drive. We are more likely to get kids registered to vote at 16 or 17 years old, supported in the school system to understand elections.

I remember being involved in many protests as a child in school and very much understanding gender differences at that stage. Some issues arose on the gender ground. When I about ten years old, the sixth class students in the Sacred Heart school organised protests at the unfairness of girls having to wear school skirts. We were freezing in the winter and were not allowed to wear leggings underneath them. We might have been told to wear tights but we probably felt we were too cool and old to be wearing tights at that stage, so we were not having a bar of that. We organised protests outside the school. We took risks, negotiated and engaged, and since then girls in the Sacred Heart School in Killinarden have worn trousers. That is a long time ago. I am 37 years old now and I was probably ten when those protests happened. Once a person is engaged in a political action, dialogue or conversation, he or she begins to think in a critical way at a very young age. I took it for granted at that time that girls wore skirts and the boys wore trousers, but then I thought it is bigger than that, something else is going on and how could I apply the same thought mechanism concerning that gender issue to other areas of my life.

That is when we began to challenge issues for altar girls. I was an altar girl, which may possibly come as a surprise to many people.