Bland on the run

You get a bit of a buzz out of voting, don’t you? Walking away from the polling station, there’s a sense of power – “Yev all had yer say, now I’m casting judgement, making my choice.”
That’s me, the Citizen, the building block of the democracy and, in the Republic, the ultimate decision-maker along with hundreds of thousands of others to whom all, the President included, is beholden.
Sure, we have to wait five years for our go. But it comes around. And when it does, there’s enough of us who like being democrats, that everyone accepts the result.
The closest analogy is with those who play sports at a very high level. While the game is on, you go at it hammer and tongs. You bust a gut, give no quarter, yield not an inch. Then, when the game is done you shake on it, express appreciation and give respect.
With good reason. When you watch the merciless process at work, as the votes are counted and distributed, and when you see those who, until the day before, were cocks o’ the walk becoming feather dusters right before your eyes, you appreciate the bravery it takes to put your ass on the line every five years.
Few of us would go down that road and, however much we might disagree with the policies they promote or pursue, at the very least we owe them respect. Those who gloated at the political demise of the Minister for Justice Michael McDowell please take note – and remember that he wasn’t the only one who went down.
The election itself was very strange and the result will be much pondered for a while. Like so many things in life, people are finding what they want to find. I found a few myself.
The first is that while the Labour Party was right to offer the voters a choice, it was side-lined by the presidential or personality focus that emerged. That’s nobody’s fault, but it meant that the election became a contest between two blocks and therefore between the leaders of the blocks, rather than between the ideas they espoused.
Actually, it’s hard to find any major ideological difference between the main players. Trevor Sargent referred to Fianna Fáil and Fianna Fáil lite. He may have been right.
In other words, while the voters had a choice between administrations and personalities, in effect they had no choice between philosophies. The voters saw that – and decided that they’d stick with the devil they knew…
This brings me to the second; the apparent resurrection of Fine Gael. Is it real or imagined? Well, in the sense that the party has increased its representation by 60%, it’s real, and congratulations for that. But in the sense that it represents something new, it isn’t.
Because of the presidential nature of the contest, the two big parties sucked in all the oxygen. Fine Gael’s success is as much about reclaiming ground from the independents and PDs. But that in itself begs a question: was their rise in the ‘90s and the ‘00s simply a result of Fine Gael’s weakness?
At a deeper level you have to ask, in what substantive way does Fine Gael differ from Fianna Fáil or indeed the PDs? I see the choice but I can’t see the difference. And when you look at transfer patterns around the country, a lot of voters can’t see it either because the preferences travelled in many directions…
And so to the third.
If you had the opportunity to get out and talk to people in different parts of the country you would have gathered that most ordinary people had a conversion moment about 10 days into the campaign. But it wasn’t to do with the two contending blocks, it was to do with the third key player in the election: the media.
Because the tribunal ‘revelations’ had already travelled a long way, when they arose anew early in the campaign, along with a campaign by the nurses that many saw as opportunistic, there was a palpable sense that the media was trying to screw Bertie Ahern. Since there wasn’t any significant difference between the contenders, this started to look like the commentariat just wanted someone new to write about.
Irish voters react badly to this kind of thing. They think someone is trying to tell them what they should do. So they do the opposite.
The pro-Bertie vote was as much against media smart-arsery as for Fianna Fail and there’s a buzz in that too. In truth, most voters just want the politicians to get on with it, make sure things work at local and national level and not let us down internationally. If the dream expressed by Ruairi Quinn a decade ago, that Ireland would be as rich and as boring as Switzerland came to pass, the Irish wouldn’t object.
The result? The media have as much to ponder about the outcome as the other losers.
And so to the fourth. We’ve seen various colourful characters dispatched by the voters, in particular Michael McDowell and Joe Higgins, one on the right and the other on the left.
Both were tough, direct and ideologically driven parliamentarians. You could disagree with both on various things. But Irish politics will be much duller and less about ideas without them in the Dáil and I regret that. In a world of spin, McDowell and Higgins, in their respective and contrary ways, kept alive the notion that politics might be about ideas and vision rather than pragmatism and personality.
Love ’em or loathe ’em, they’ll be missed.