I thought I was sharing time with Deputy Lawless. If he comes in, I will try to finish up quickly. Otherwise, I would like the opportunity to spend some time on this very important issue. I thank Deputy Farrelly for tabling the Bill, which is hugely important. We have had others in the past push towards it. Maybe society has changed and maybe we are getting to the point where we are ready to make this leap. It is a momentous leap, if we make it and it is a very important motion. First, I will address the Government's suggestion about coming back to this in a year. If we take that at face value rather than as a political stunt, as Deputy Paul Murphy suggested, there is an argument in support of taking time to discuss it. Deputy O'Gorman mentioned the local and European elections as a first step. Some individuals and parties would like to go for the full leap and I can see the merits in that as well. If it was parked for a year and we got all of this research and it came back again, where would we be? We would probably have to spend another year getting to the point where we would have to hold a referendum. At that stage, we would have the debate all over again. It is better, if we are being honest with ourselves and if this Bill is passed - and I will support it - to facilitate having a proper debate and working towards a decent referendum where we can have an open and honest discussion about the pros and some of the cons. I will turn to Austria first. Various countries have been mentioned but Austria was the first country, to my knowledge, that actually brought this in for full elections. We had it for municipal elections in Germany and Scotland came a year or two after Austria. A study entitled "Lowering the Voting Age to 16 in Practice: Processes and Outcomes Compared" by Jan Eichorn from the School of Social and Political Science/Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh and Johannes Bergh from the Institute for Social Research in Oslo, Norway made specific reference to Austria and Scotland. In all of the countries for which data is available researchers could not find any negative effects of lowering the voting age on young people's engagement or their civic attitudes. They said that in many instances, the opposite was the case and that enfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds were usually more interested in politics, more likely to vote and demonstrated pro-civic attitudes such as institutional trust, which is hugely important these days. People have lost trust in politicians and religious institutions because of systemic abuse over the years, in the legal profession and more and more in the so-called mainstream media, wrongly as it may be in some instances. Young people who were able to vote from the age of 16 onwards were found - not just in the first year but over their voting lives - to be more likely to be engaged. This was found in Austria, Scotland and Latin American countries. While there were different experiences, at the very least this interest in voting was partially retained. Where we have the data, it shows that it works. There are arguments that suggest that younger people are not as mature as others, as has been mentioned in this Chamber. We know, for example, in the context of motor insurance that those under 24 are more likely to be involved in road traffic accidents than older cohorts. Sometimes it is suggested that this is because the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed, leading to greater impulsivity and so on. My wife suggests that men in particular probably do not mature until the age of 50 or older. I will not comment on that. All I can comment on is the genius of young people in mock elections, fifth and six years who consistently elected me in mock elections. I was just being facetious for a second, but I do take young people’s voices very seriously. Young people see through the waffle that political parties and candidates often try to spin to get votes in elections. They ask the pertinent and hard questions, albeit not everyone. Sometimes I have gone into a school and faced a wall of silence. That is often a confidence issue. People do not feel they should ask a particular question, so the first thing I say is, “Say whatever you want, however stupid you think it is and be as impolite as you'd like.” Usually that gets the juices flowing. Younger people have a greater social conscience. When we look at the Fridays for Future school protests, for example, and the Gaza protests as was mentioned, we see that young people are fearless. This is also about having a stake in society. Rates of voting are higher among the older generation. Let us take the example of Brexit in the UK. Obviously, we need a proper and open debate on immigration and I have called for a citizen's forum on that but in the Brexit discussion, the people who were most afraid of immigrants were from areas with an older population that had no immigrants. It was older people who were stuck in their ways. There is a lot of value among our older voting cohort. They have been through a lot and have seen the way our society has developed over the years. There is a lot of wisdom there, but equally, there is wisdom among our youth and we have to hear their voices more and get more of them engaging. It has been shown time and again in society that social movement comes through young people. Everyone else tends to go towards the status quo. In one sense it is human nature. In another, it is about trying to preserve the best of the past and being a little afraid to move forward. Young people are not afraid to ask the new questions and put in the new challenges and the time has come for their voices. However, I caution to some degree, with the amount of misinformation that is going out, what I describe as the Andrew Tate-ification and misogyny that reaches into our primary schools. There is a need, alongside, for the general population, but also for our young people, given they are the subject of this discussion and cannot even contribute to the debate but that is another story. Politics and society should be a compulsory subject for everyone and we should give time to critical thinking and analysing what is in the media, where it comes from, why the likes of RTÉ sometimes seem to be a day or two behind on stories. It is because it is afraid of being sued. It wants to have the facts right and it cannot report on something that is hearsay and allegation. My background is in journalism. I am all too aware of what can and cannot be said. Meanwhile, we have so-called dog-kicking citizen journalists who were in far-right parties bringing young people up hills to try to indoctrinate them. They go around asking "Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that?" with no moral compass and no fact-checking whatsoever. This is what is on TikTok, YouTube and Discord. It is all over the place and we need fact-checking filters. I have three teenage kids. I have worked with a lot of transition year students. I have been involved in local GAA clubs and I was involved in youth groups in the past. I have found that, as social media has developed, the tendency for people to be taken in by it has begun to diminish, especially among younger cohorts and those who are more likely to be duped and take stuff at face value are older people. At the same time, when most of the news for young people comes through social media and other online platforms, we need to mix in the political filter that is education. I am not talking down to young people saying they need to be educated. We all need to be educated. When a process is being brought in and, I hope, a referendum is being held on bringing the national voting age down to 16, a lot of people in society, as they did with the question about the age of 35 in the Presidency, will bring in a lot of red herrings and ask some valid questions and those questions need to be answered. We need to have the checks and balances, when the debate comes, to say this is not a problem, that it has happened in other countries, why it will be good in Ireland, that we take on board what is being said and what we will do to ensure that when the voting age is reduced, people with fears will be placated. In my last few seconds, I again thank the Social Democrats for bringing forward this Bill. They have my wholehearted support. I hope the Government will consider passing it now, or that at least in 12 months' time it will live up to its word and get it moving to a referendum as soon as possible.

Sentiment score: 0.10