Lowering the Voting Age Campaign - Press Release

Labour candidate Dermot Looney calls on Minister to lower voting age to 16

Labour's youngest candidate in Ireland for the 2009 local elections is to lead a campaign to allow 16 and 17 year olds vote in next year's polls.

Dermot Looney, a Labour Youth activist and community campaigner from Greenhills in Dublin 12, has called on Environment Minister John Gormley to lower the voting age in local and European parliament elections from 18 to 16. He is joined in his campaign by secondary school students from across the local area and by Labour Youth, the youth section of the Labour Party.

Looney has been recently selected by Labour to run in the Terenure-Rathfarnham Ward of South Dublin County Council. He has said that the campaign, which will be launched on June 16th as a symbol of the change demanded, will write to all secondary schools in the country to seek the support of students.

Looney will also join with Labour Youth in launching an innovative online campaign through sites such as Bebo and Youtube, and has called on young people of all political persuasions to join with him in demanding their voting rights.

"16 and 17 year olds have a great deal of experience with the democratic process. The teenagers of this generation have far more knowledge of politics through the CSPE programme in secondary schools. They are increasingly engaged in political and charity campaigns. And they are heavily impacted on by decisions made at local and European level," Looney stated.

"Articles 12 and 16 of our Constitution enforce a voting age of 18 and above for Dáil and Presidential elections in Ireland," Looney said. "But there is no such constitutional requirement for local and European elections, such as those happening in 12 months time."

"As someone who is in contact with young people on a daily basis and in a variety of capacities, I am constantly encouraged by their commitment to social justice, equality and democracy. And a great many teenagers are rightly angered by the demonisation of youth by conservative politicians and media outlets. Now's the time for young people to stand up and be counted," stated Looney.

Colm Lawless (16), a fellow Dublin South West Labour Youth activist who has just completed Transition Year, said that; "Teenagers are constantly under-estimated by politicians. We're far more engaged and interested in politics than they realise, and we want to have a vote in the issues that matter to us."

Lawless continued; "Our research indicates that 16 and 17 year olds in Austria and much of Germany are permitted the vote at local level. According to their general election manifesto, the Green Party share Labour's policy on reducing the voting age for local and Euro elections to 16. Now's the time to act on this promise," he said.

Lawless concluded, "As someone who is currently disenfranchised, I'm joining with Dermot Looney to call on Minister Gormley to enact the change."

ENDS

Note for Editors - The National Youth Council of Ireland currently support the lowering of the voting age in local and European elections to 16. Austria permits municipal council voting from 16, and the same applies in the German states of Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein.

Dermot Looney will be hosting a photoshoot with young supporters calling for the lowering of the voting age on Monday June 16th - full details to follow next week.

Indecent and Uncivilised; Healthcare for the Elite

Originally penned for the latest edition of Left Tribune

The Dublin demonstration on March 29^th in support of decent public healthcare brought yet another outlet to a national anger felt at Ireland’s crippled health system. Dermot Looney looks at the history of Irish healthcare and the political issues which place public opinion very firmly on the left.

There are simply no issues in politics that touch us as personally and emotively as health. All of us have been patients to varying degrees. Many of us have been deeply involved as family members, professionals or others in the vast array of services and institutions that comprise Irish healthcare. Matters of death and life, pain and recovery and suffering and wellness affect us innately. The strings of conscience and empathy are pulled for all as shared experiences of illness and treatment strike universal chords.

Therefore, it is not surprising to have seen and heard the unprecedented levels of personal testimony across the airwaves and in print from those most affected by deficiencies in Irish healthcare in recent times. Emergent from a history of bit-part residualism and dominated by today’s self-serving neoliberal agenda, it is no wonder that people in Ireland are becoming increasingly enraged at the failure to provide a world class public health system.

Ireland’s experience with healthcare in the modern age has been borne out of traditions of poverty and exclusion, along with the unseemly alliance of liberal economics with the pre-eminence of the Catholic hierarchy. An unconnected system of voluntary religious-based institutions dominated from the first semblance of public healthcare for the ‘deserving poor’ under the workhouse systems to recent times. Initial attempts to socialise medicine were mere pipe dreams against the hegemony of subsidiarity in Irish social policy.

Halfway through the twentieth century, just a couple of years after Nye Bevan could successfully launch a comprehensive National Health Service across the Irish Sea that was universal, paid for through general taxation and free at the point of access, a mild effort by a fellow socialist towards a much narrower universalist provision for mothers and their children in the Republic of Ireland was met with a vicious response from the hierarchy and medical profession.

Noel Browne’s attempts to follow up his successful campaign against the scourge of tuberculosis with the Mother and Child Scheme ended in defeat for his proposals. But his exposé of the role of the Church and Irish Medical Association in the aftermath showed that, despite governmental efforts to take onboard public healthcare more seriously with the formation of a Department of Health in 1947, true power continued to lie in the hands of wealthy doctors and powerful clerics.

Shamefully, the initial support for the scheme from the Labour Party members in government was soon withdrawn in the face of pressure from institutions and individuals of the deepest conservatism. The scandal also played a part in the downfall of the Clann na Poblachta party and instilled a fear factor for those pursuing progressive health policies for a generation.

Health reforms have come and gone, with the 1980’s being a key time for cuts in beds and care due to a series of regressive budgets. The economic prosperity of the late 1990’s should have brought about a sea change in the provision of a healthcare policy that in secondary (hospital) care is ostensibly universal and free. But instead of the extension and expansion of provision at both primary and secondary levels, and in mental health and other key sectors, the record of successive Fianna Fáil-led administrations has been one of politically-motivated sham. Support for their private sector friends and an outright refusal to extend medical card cover for the less well-off have been just two of the moral outrages led by these governments.

Understandably and correctly, much of the focus of the widespread criticism has been on the scandalous levels of incompetence and repeated ‘systems failures’ – a term devised, no doubt, to make administrators and healthcare professionals sound more like machines than members of government-devised teams and structures. There has also been an enormous emphasis from media, patients groups and professionals on hospital cleanliness, an issue which 10 years ago would have seemed one truly at the micro-level.

It is crucial for Labour and the left to address issues such as these not only in terms of competence, but as a result of a series of political decisions by the most avowedly right-wing Irish government in the last 50 years. Chronic underfunding in a number of key areas – not least recruitment – as well as a political decision to effectively outsource the administration of healthcare to the HSE, a highly centralised body with no real public accountability, were a result of governmental policy. The unapologetic neoliberalism of the Progressive Democrats made an easy bedfellow for the conservative dodgery of Fianna Fáil.

But, significantly for Labour and the left, the economic thrust of health provision in terms of the privatisation agenda has also been a source of enormous opposition across the country. For now, it certainly seems that public opinion is very firmly on the left; supportive of public health and not the need for outsourcing our sick people to private profiteers.

An already-unacceptable two-tier system which forced those lucky enough to afford it to take out private health insurance has been exacerbated to the point that it could now be argued that not having private insurance is now a sign of poverty in itself. The campaign for a system that is both public and decent recognises the need for improvements in competence to be based on and accompanied by a commitment to public healthcare, not a system which, fancy language and specious arguments notwithstanding, continues to reward those who happen to be very rich. It seems the concentration of power has remained in the hands of elites all along; be it the Church hierarchy, conservative doctors or, increasingly, the healthcare capitalists.

Nye Bevan, the visionary socialist behind the British NHS, wrote in his book In Place of Fear that “no society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” Such an appalling vista exists in one of the supposed wealthiest countries in the world. If we are to rediscover our civility and compassion as a society, retaining the morality of public and universal healthcare will be at the forefront of the campaign for change.

A New Logo

Simon Ward, the newly-appointed editor of my former rag "(The) College Tribune," has had a little fun with his Photoshop talents.

Whether this is meant in tribute or in insult depends on your take on Simon's nice-guy persona, but I for one love it.

Is féidir linn!

Clearing out Jurassic Park?

I saw two elephants at the Cuckoo's Nest last week, and it frightened the life out of me. Now, it seems, worse is to come. Dinosaurs are on the prowl. Dinosaur TD's no less. But thankfully, Eamon Gilmore is out to hunt them. Or so he is says in the Irish Independent today. It seems more geared towards Dáil elections, but could he be hunting the pterodactyls of town, city and county councils across Ireland?

LABOUR leader Eamon Gilmore is preparing for the party's most radical overhaul in decades -- and is ready to tell 'dinosaur' TDs they will have to change their ways.

Mr Gilmore particularly wants TDs seen as squatting on seats in certain constituencies to make room for fresh talent.

There is already speculation in the party that Labour could start running a slate of two candidates in electoral areas where it has traditionally fielded one.

Such a strategy, while making party incumbents more vulnerable, could also prevent the all-too-common case whereby a faltering Labour candidate, unable to receive intra-party transfers, ends up electing a Fine Gael or Fianna Fail candidate instead.

.....

Labour leader Eamon Gilmore signalled his intention to spearhead "significant internal reform" to party councillors assembled in Kilkenny last week, advisers said.

While Mr Gilmore did not go into detail about the reforms he envisaged, many party councillors -- large numbers of them Dail hopefuls -- left the meeting convinced that he would tackle the log jams that have prevented advancement in the past.

The dominance of strong individuals in many Labour fiefdoms led to a situation whereby the party had the unenviable distinction of holding the oldest age profile in the last Dail.

While Sean Sherlock and Ciaran Lynch made their breakthrough at the last election, most of their colleagues are old enough to be their parents.

Senior party advisers conceded to the Irish Independent that Mr Gilmore had signalled his "clear intention" to tackle circumstances whereby the party was harming itself.

Some councillors took this to mean a move to dismantle private election machines so that they can be reassembled for the overall good of the party.

Buoyed by a 3pc gain in party popularity and a rise in his own approval ratings, Mr Gilmore will never have a better chance to make the overhaul than at the start of his leadership.

The changes "would come out of the current review of party structures and practices" overseen by Greg Sparks, and now taking place across the country.

Addressing the South East Labour Councillors Association meeting, Mr Gilmore remarked: "The party that had the courage to change Ireland must now have the courage to change itself. We need to re-organise and strengthen the party, to ensure that we are attracting and welcoming new members, holding on to seats that we have when a public representative retires, and starting to make inroads in those parts of the country where we have only a minimal presence.''

.....

You may have seen on the Labour Youth homepage that I'm the first and only youth candidate to be selected so far by the Labour Party (the full story is here by the way).

A source of pride, fair enough, but a great pity that more young candidates have not got the chance to represent our party so far.

No-one in Labour needs reminding of an ageing parliamentary section, a situation which is somewhat replicated in terms of council and local reps as a general rule.

Before I offend, let's get one thing clear - there is absolutely nothing wrong with those of any age as political advocates. Tony Benn is living, breathing, agitating proof of it. And we have a great many older members of our party - many more radical than their following generations - whose commitment and advocacy have sustained Labour for decades.

But there is a need for the Labour Party to renew itself. As pointed out in a previous post, this doesn't mean Blairite "modernisation." But promoting young candidates who are of and for Labour is most certainly part of a project of renewal, growth and rebuilding.

The past 5 years have seen more activity, more engagement and more politics from younger members of the Labour Party than the previous fifteen. The cliché that Labour Youth is now the conscience of the party is just that, but certainly the youth section have done more to re-assert socialist values in recent times than had been expected from a party which is always at risk of being sucked into the bland whirlpool of spin which is the Irish political centre. And, to continue the water theme, the 'resevoir of talent' spoken about by one prominent activist at the previous selection convention in Terenure-Rathfarnham is, well, overflowing in comparison with other groups.

Eamon Gilmore has spoken at length on the need for new young candidates; in an interview with Christine Bohan in the latest issue of Left Tribune he makes a number of points about renewal in the context of promoting young candidates;

He is enthusiastic, albeit somewhat diplomatically, about the role of Labour Youth in the party, describing it as "crucially important". "The young people joining the Labour party today are going to be the people controlling it in ten years time. I know that there has been - there is always a tendency with political parties that youth wings and the leadership can sometimes be at odds over things. But building the future of the party is going to be a collaboration between
the leadership and the young members."

Having made a point of encouraging younger party members to run in next year's local elections, he acknowledges that it can be difficult for them to challenge older members for seats. However he is adamant that it can be done.

So will the leader and his team live up to the challenge?

A new website

You can now check me out on my labour.ie page at http://www.labour.ie/dermotlooney

Don't worry though - as if you would - there'll be plenty more content to be blogged here shortly.