Never believe anyone who says they “get on with everybody”. There are hundreds of human subspecies who deserve criticism. My list of people who annoy me gets longer every day. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s because every day humans find new ways to irritate each other. For example, 20 years ago people who called the home phone after 9pm without a good reason were rude. Now it’s eejits who blare music on public transport from their tinny phone speaker.
Some grievances are seasonal. I whisper a silent curse against those who use social media to brag about how they’ve “done all the Christmas shopping and have all the presents wrapped under the tree before December”. They love to shove their performative organisation down our throats but I have a theory that the smug early birders don’t actually buy thoughtful gifts. It’s easy to have Christmas sorted before children are letting off illegal fireworks in estates if you’ve given everyone either an impersonal scented candle or a Lynx Africa gift set.
While some doses are temporary, others are forever. The particular kind of person who will remain on my s**t list permanently are people who can vote in elections but don’t. It’s known in policy circles as CBA. Or “Can’t Be Arsed” for the laypeople among us. They are up there with people who don’t pick up dog poop and those who speak badly to hospitality staff.
My father has a few rules for life, each more eccentric than his last, like “never trust a man who doesn’t eat beetroot” and “each-way bets are for cowards”. One of his favourite suggestions for a better society is “anybody who didn’t vote in the last election but complains about the Government should face corporal punishment”. Which is a bit of an extreme way of dealing with things, coming from a man who puts his trust in people based on their feelings towards a root vegetable. But the sentiment is there.
How dare you whinge about how things are run when you didn’t do the one thing that could have influenced it? People don’t vote “because it won’t make a difference anyway”, despite voting being, actually, the only guaranteed way the average person can make a difference. That is the entire point of a democracy.
Voting can be about putting the best party in power or keeping the worst out. But it can also be used to shape policy and programmes. If parties know which demographics are likely to bother voting, guess who they try to appeal to? According to the Australia Institute, after compulsory voting was introduced in Australia, conservative parties stopped opposing the old-age pension now that everyone had to vote. They also claim that after women got the vote, “there were large, sudden increases in public health spending to reduce child mortality.”
Imagine if we could do that for special needs children languishing on assessment wait-lists in Ireland or living in hotels because there is no housing.
Australia’s voting turnout hasn’t dipped below 90 per cent in nearly a century, since mandatory voting was introduced. While copping a fine is an incentive to vote, they also make it a hell of a lot easier to engage in democracy by allowing early polling, postal voting, extending the right to vote to eligible citizens overseas and allowing you to vote out of your electorate on the big day.
[ Australia’s compulsory voting systemOpens in new window ]
Ireland’s system. on the other hand. feels so restrictive that you could confuse it for a clumsy attempt at gerrymandering if you didn’t know better. It could partially explain why voter turnout figures at this last election slunk in just below 60 per cent. It was described as the election of people voting for more of the same but a lot just didn’t vote at all.
Which is something I’ll never understand. People died fighting for the democratic rights some of us aren’t bothered exercising. Modern Ireland is built on the demand for self-determination. It is a country that was hard won through risings and rebellions ultimately all in the hope that Irish people would have a say in how they would be governed. So it blows my mind that people won’t get off their sofa to vote with a history like that. Meanwhile Australians are motivated to cast their ballot partly by a bit of sausage on white bread sold at polling places. Simple creatures that we are.
While it might be on the Government to make it easier for Irish citizens to vote, it’s on Irish citizens to GOTV (get out the vote) or GOYATV (get off your arse to vote).