Minister for Justice Alan Shatter joined Dublin Lord Mayor Oisín Quinn and Dublin City Council officials on 4 November for the launch of a citywide campaign to encourage people to register to vote before a deadline later this month.
The minister also called on new Irish citizens and Irish residents from elsewhere to register to vote in local and European elections in May 2014, depending on which they are eligible for.
The deadline for people to register with their local authorities is 25 November.
More than 17 per cent of Dublin’s population are from a non-Irish background, yet only about five per cent of the 323,000 people registered to vote in the Dublin City Council area are immigrants.
Minister Shatter said that he understood that it takes time for new arrivals in Ireland to get set up and develop an interest in the “cut and thrust” of political life here, yet he encouraged them to find time to take part on polling day.
“It is important to get the message into the public domain as widely as possible that those who are entitled to vote must be included in the register of electors, so that they can exercise their democratic right to fully participate in the process of electing their political representatives,” he said.
