When it comes to the European Union (EU), there are several differences between the United Kingdom and Ireland, and we didn’t need last Thursday’s referendum result to tell us that. Most of these differences were actually evident in the most recent Eurobarometer survey, which was conducted in November. Over three-quarters of Irish people felt that they were citizens of the EU, one of the highest figures in the union. Only half of citizens felt the same way in the UK. Asked whether they thought Ireland would be able to face the future better outside of the EU, 25 per cent of Irish people thought it could. Across the Irish Sea, around half of citizens thought that the UK could. This positioned the UK as one of the most Eurosceptic countries in the union, and Ireland amongst the least. Ireland’s people have also been given the right to vote on EU treaties, enlargement, and most recently the Fiscal Compact Treaty, something that had only happened once before in the UK.
But Thursday’s referendum revealed an equally pronounced difference between the UK and Ireland: that of youth engagement with politics. On what has been described as an “existential question of national destiny” for the UK, just 36 per cent of 18–24 year olds decided it was worth their time to reach a polling station, seven percentage points lower than the turnout for the same group at the 2015 UK general election, and an order of magnitude lower than the 72 per cent overall turnout. In comparison, over 80 per cent of the same age cohort were expected to vote in Ireland’s general election in February, and we need not even go into how instrumental Ireland’s young people were to last year’s marriage equality referendum result. Youth turnout had also been described as key to the passing of the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in Ireland.
It is the UK’s young people who, by definition, will have to live longest with the result. Not only do they lose citizenship of the EU, but the right to live and work in 27 other EU countries. While young voters in the UK are right to blame the older generations who turned out in droves to vote out of the EU, they should be just as incensed by the turnout of their peers.
