Exercising the right to vote

I am an Irishman and I spend most of my free time (which amounts to about five months of the year) here in Malta. I have seen my native country go from strength to strength since joining the Common Market, as it was known in the early 1970s. I have mixed feelings about both sides of the "for and against" arguments regarding membership of the European Union. I have no political aspirations and generally keep my views to myself.

I have always made it my business to go out and vote on a polling day, no matter how small or trivial the issue was, because it is my democratic right to do so. My forefathers died fighting for that civil right in the early part of the last century. It is not so long ago that Catholics in Northern Ireland gained their democratic right to vote. In fact, the death and bloodshed we witnessed in Northern Ireland on our television screens started in 1969 during marches by Northern Irish Catholics campaigning for their civil rights. Up till then, Catholics could not vote. Thankfully, most of that trouble has finally ended and it has taken a great deal of pragmatism on both sides to achieve it.

I am not delivering a lecture in Irish history but what I am saying is that I think it is highly irresponsible for any democratically-elected representative or body to instruct their electorate (as depicted on the front page of The Sunday Times, March 2) to invalidate their vote or abstain from voting on polling day. It is the electorate's democratic right to vote that put that representative or body there in the first place.

Everybody must go out and vote so that a proper assessment can be made of the wishes of the electorate. That is what democracy is about and there are many millions of people that would cherish the civil right that we, in a civilised society, enjoy.