I thank the Social Democrats and Deputy Farrelly in particular for bringing this forward. It is a really important Bill and it is great they have used their Private Members' time for it. I do not think we need to debate this; it is the most obvious thing in the world that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to vote. It is their future and them who are going to live in the barbarous world we are currently on a trajectory for. It is them who have the power and I hope are going to avert us from the course we are currently on, of descent into ecological breakdown, a world marked by war and genocide, the rise of the far-right, authoritarianism and fascism. They are the people currently out working, paying taxes, able to join the army and not permitted a say in all the decisions that are made. They are the ones who on the current trajectory are going to be forced to emigrate, because they cannot afford to get housing here. They are the ones affected by all of it and they are fully mature. I will come back to the point on maturity later. If a person was not familiar with Dáil procedures, they could look at this and say the Government is not being unreasonable. It is saying to give a year for the Independent Electoral Commission to look into it further. That all sounds very reasonable. Let me say, this is a scam. The Government is kicking the can down the road. It has no intention whatsoever of allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to vote. It is not telling young people the truth. That is what is happening here. A person could say to me it is very cynical to think that, but the reason I know it is because the Government did exactly the same thing to a Bill I brought forward to stop discrimination against young people. In 2022, I brought forward at First Stage a Bill for equal pay for young workers to stop the scandal of sub-minimum wages, whereby under 20s are legally allowed to be paid less than the minimum wage. We brought that to Second Stage, which is what is happening here, on 14 June 2023. Again, the Government did not have the courage of its convictions to vote against it and say it was in favour of the super-exploitation of young people, so instead it did the same thing and tabled a timed amendment and said the Low Pay Commission was looking into it and it would delay it for a year and that a year later it would be deemed to be passed. The Low Pay Commission, the body that was going to look into it, then came out and said we should get rid of sub-minimum wages. The report the Government said it was going to wait for came out and said it should do the thing our Bill was going to do. Did the Government then do it? No. It said the Department of Finance needed a further economic investigation into how much it would cost. It started that over a year ago. It did not even wait for that to be published; it is still not published, and the Government has said it is not going to do it. It said it will reconsider it in 2029. So, this is a scam the Government is currently engaged in. It does not have the courage to say it does not think 16 and 17-year-olds should be allowed to vote so instead it is kicking the can down the road and trying to make it go away. The only way the Government will be beaten on it is if public pressure comes to bear and it feels it cannot withstand it. The bottom-line point on the maturity issue is the Government thinks we are immature. It is not just young people it thinks are immature, it thinks all of the left is immature. If we look at the neutrality debate, we are presented as being immature because we are in favour of neutrality. We are presented as immature because we are in favour of actual climate action. We are in favour of what Micheál Martin spoke about in Brazil; actually doing it, following the science and telling the truth as opposed to bending over backwards to multinational corporations, big tech, fossil fuel companies and big agri businesses. The Government thinks that is immature and not taking the economy seriously. It thinks saying we should invest money in building housing that is affordable is immature because we do not understand how the market works. When it says young people are not mature enough to vote, what it is really giving away and what it is scared of, is that young people have progressive opinions on a wide range of things and are not going to back up the continuation of the rule of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and will look to the left. For me, that is not the reason to support it. It is a point of principle regardless of how young people are going to vote. The fact is 16 and 17 year olds should of course have the right to a say and vote. We should stop the paternalistic attitude towards them. We would also get all the benefits seen in other countries in terms of increased turnout as we would be engaging people at a younger point. Those points have been made.

Sentiment score: -0.03