Ninth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland
To allow non-Irish citizens to vote in general elections
The Ninth Amendment of the Constitution Act 1984 (previously bill no. 11 of 1984) is an amendment to the Constitution of Ireland that allowed for the extension of the right to vote in elections to Dáil Éireann (the house of representatives of the Oireachtas) to non-Irish citizens. It was approved by referendum on 14 June 1984, the same day as the European Parliament election, and signed into law on 2 August of the same year.
Background
Article 16 of the Constitution of Ireland as approved in 1937, and amended in 1972 to lower the voting age, provided that the franchise for elections to Dáil Éireann would be citizens who have reached the age of 18. The Electoral Amendment Bill 1983, proposed by the Fine Gael–Labour Party government led by Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, would have amended the Electoral Act 1963 to allow British citizens as defined by the British Nationality Act 1981 to vote in elections to Dáil Éireann. This was to reciprocate the Representation of the People Act 1949, a British statute, which among other provisions had granted Irish citizens resident in the United Kingdom the right to vote in elections to the British parliament.
The Bill was referred by President Patrick Hillery to the Supreme Court under Article 26 of the Constitution. In a judgment delivered on 8 February 1984, they found the bill to be unconstitutional.
In response, the government then proposed a constitutional amendment which would specifically allow the franchise in elections to Dáil Éireann to be extended to non-Irish citizens. This did not affect presidential elections or referendums, where the text of the Constitution continued to specify citizens only.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ninth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland” as to allow non-Irish citizens to vote in general elections. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as to allow non-Irish citizens to vote in general elections. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3147018. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1937, 1972 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ninth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.