Tacaím leis an mBille seo. Tá sé ag dul sa treo ceart. This Bill is going in the right direction and we will support it. Sinn Féin firmly believes in the core republican principle of equal citizenship and supports the right of all citizens of voting age to vote for the Irish President, regardless of their place of residence. The Good Friday Agreement states the Government recognises the right of all people born in the North to identify as Irish citizens if they wish. We should not treat them as second-class Irish citizens but as full Irish citizens with full voting rights. It is a dreadful exclusion that our citizens in the North are treated with such disdain that they cannot vote for the President of Ireland. In September 2013, 73% of the members of the constitutional convention voted in favour of giving Irish citizens resident in the North a presidential vote. This was not the answer the sitting Fine Gael-Labour Government wanted and that Government missed deadlines in issuing responses to recommendations of the convention, refused to hold referendums on many of its recommendations and held an unsuccessful referendum on the future of the Seanad, without the support of the convention. The Government should have faced up to the democratic demands of that convention to end this disenfranchisement. Instead, it pretended it never happened, as governments always do when citizens' assemblies do not produce the result they want. We are still waiting for meaningful action on the report from the Citizens' Assembly on Drugs Use. It fell to the Opposition to try to make real the change that the Assembly demanded. Gerry Adams and I introduced a Bill very similar to the one we are debating now in March 2014. It would have been the thirty-fourth amendment to the Constitution. Many referendums have come and gone, and still our Northern citizens are excluded. Our Bill would have granted the franchise to every citizen of Ireland without disqualification on the basis of place of residency. In this regard, I refer to many of the issues the Minister of State dealt with. I would like to think that the President represents us all and that every citizen would have a say in the selection of their representative. While this Bill is narrower in scope than mine, it would be an important first step and a realisation that the Good Friday Agreement promised that all citizens would be equal. My Bill is still on the Order Paper and ready to go if the Government lends its support to it. There is always talk of the legal and logistical challenges that come with change like this. However, are we really saying we cannot organise polling stations or a postal vote across the North? People queuing up outside embassies in Dublin in order that they can vote in elections back home is a regular sight, and not just in the case of presidential elections. Some countries, including South Africa, allow a special vote for all citizens abroad in their national elections. We act as if it would be the biggest logistical feat since the Berlin airlift. Ireland is, in fact, among a small minority of countries that do not allow non-resident citizens any sort of voting rights. One hundred and forty countries currently allow voting in at least some elections. There is a broader discussion to be had in this State about the obstacles to voting. The difficulty in obtaining a postal vote is on that list, along with the poor quality of the electoral register. Let me quote the 2020 general election manifesto of Fine Gael: We support extending the franchise at presidential elections to Irish citizens resident outside the State. This referendum will take place within the first year of Fine Gael being returned to Government. If passed, this will allow Irish citizens in Northern Ireland and around the world to vote in the next presidential election, in 2025. These are the words of the Fine Gael Party. That was the commitment it made to the people, supposedly in exchange for their support. Fine Gael was returned to office, but there was no referendum. The presidential election has come and gone. It is not as if Fine Gael did not have plenty of opportunity. Former Minister for foreign affairs Simon Coveney introduced a Bill in this area in 2019, with the referendum question already worded. The previous Government could have picked up where he left off, and no one in this House, bar, perhaps, the current Taoiseach, would have objected. We cannot go on ignoring the right of all our citizens to have a say. We are reducing their citizenship to little more than a passport. Let us start with giving our Northern countrymen and countrywomen a vote for a President who represents all on our island.

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