RTV has come together very quickly. “We only started taking the first steps recently,” says Paddy Cosgrave, the group’s executive director. “We got in touch with some businessmen to see if they’d be able to help us out with a project like this, and there was a lot of interest, we were encouraged by that. We got some money and a little office space and we were away.”
It’s a first for Ireland, but there’s a long history of initiatives like this in the United States – which is where the idea came from. “I was influenced a lot by living in the States, where you couldn’t help but come across all the get-out-the-vote campaigns,” says Cosgrave. “We did a lot of research into campaigns to encourage voting by young people, looking at examples from all over the world to see what worked best.”
The original Rock The Vote campaign on the far side of the Atlantic has been active in US politics since the early 1990s. It was founded in 1990 and recruited Iggy Pop and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for its first campaign, “Censorship is un-American”. RTV registered 350,000 voters for the 1992 presidential election.
The last US presidential campaign saw a massive push by RTV to mobilise the youth vote. Almost one and a half million people were added to the electoral roll thanks to its work – most of them used the RTV website to register. The fact that Rock The Vote came out of the election almost $700,000 in debt gives you some idea of the scale of its work. Celebrities from Ben Affleck to LL Cool J have been recruited for the cause.
Ireland’s Rock The Vote organisation is affiliated with the US campaign, but they hasn't reached the same level just yet. Eight full-time staff are working away in the RTV head office, trying to reverse a depressing trend in Irish elections.
According to a report published by the Democracy Commission, a body charged with taking the pulse of Ireland’s political system, the lack of engagement from young people is alarming. It estimates that just over 40% of 18-19 year olds voted in the last general election, while the figure for 20-24 year olds was not much better – 53%. It’s not all down to apathy, the Commission insists: “Of the young non-voters aged between 18-19, there is a large gap between those who did not vote because they were not registered (39%) and those who did not vote because they were not interested (25%).”
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