Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Indeed. The Ceann Comhairle said when a former Sinn Féin Deputy brought her baby into the Dáil that it was the first time there was an actual baby in the Dáil.

My point is quite serious, masked in a small bit of attempted humour. There is a time for maturing. There is a lot of immaturity in our society. I am afraid to say that in our world today we see the increasing infantalisation of adults and perhaps an excessive tendency to defer to the younger generation. I am not worried about the impact of letting 16-year-olds vote, as opposed to the impact they might have on their parents in terms of telling them who to vote for because we have an increasingly deferential older generation who have lost the ability to lead. To lead is not to bully. To lead is to take one's experience of life and share what one has gleaned from it.

In any healthy society, there is a time for leadership and preparing for leadership.That is what I would respectfully submit the delay in raising the voting age is about. It is about respecting that there are many bright, intelligent, capable, engaged people coming up through the system. Let us hope they are because we need them to run our world and make a better fist of doing it than the current generation is. However, that does not mean we just hand them the vote straight away. The vote is something we prepare for. We prepare for it in school and as we consider the very troubling issues of our time. We do not start with our opinion; we arrive at our opinions. Many more voters in our society could do well to reflect on what they go through before they arrive at their opinion because very often all we hear is the opinion and we never hear the spade work or evidence of it in the reflection that should go into the formation of opinion. It is no insult to the capacity or desserts of the younger generation to say it is important they take an interest in the political system, and we need them to do so. We want them thinking about politics, their community and the common good now. However, the vote is something they are preparing to cast. It is something sacred, in secular terms, we might say, that they are preparing for. It is not something they should have too soon.