Election-watching has been a lot like staring at one of those ‘spot the difference’ puzzles in a children’s comic
SORRY WE missed you, they say, but we all know that’s a cover story – another one. Like the lover who doesn’t ring, the boss who doesn’t need you, the candidates are just lying to make us feel better. They never rang the bell. They don’t want to talk to us anymore.
And we don't want to talk to them, really. Notwithstanding the spectacularly well-informed old ladies on Liveline, who are submitting electoral candidates to rigorous job interviews on their very clean doorsteps, the fun has gone out of it for the rest of us. Went out of it a while ago. Voting's on Friday, in case you've blanked out completely.
Still the political wheels grind on. At the weekend it was remarkable to see the discipline of canvassers from Fianna Fáil. Out early on Sunday morning, ready to go, galloping into the enemy guns. The Labour canvassers, watching it slide away.
The young mother handing out fliers for People Before Profit outside Lidl – now there is political positioning – accompanied by her little girl, who was getting bored and restless. The ladies in yellow baseball hats and T-shirts discreetly shouting for Fine Gael. These are the workers who make an election – it’s just that they don’t actually have much to say.
Watching this election has been a lot like staring at one of those “spot the difference” puzzles in a children’s comic years ago. You have two seemingly identical pictures side by side, and you are told that the second picture has been altered in at least half a dozen ways. So you stare and stare at the Three Bears’ Breakfast, or Roy of the Rovers scoring a goal, or the contents of Bunty’s holiday suitcase.
You stare until your ears start to buzz and your eyes start to water. But you can’t spot any differences. You reckon that you’re going blind, like Helen Keller. Then the following week the publishers of the comic issue a small apology which explains that they had inserted the same, unaltered picture twice. The production staff had gone to the pub, probably.
Then, as time wore on, the people who worked on the comics wouldn’t bother apologising to the children when they made a mistake.
Yet the fact remained that, possibly because of the increased use of marijuana amongst graphic artists and also because the whole comics sector came to be staffed by temporary workers, they frequently published spot the difference puzzles which contained no differences.
And so it is with this vital, landmark election which is going to redraw the map of Irish politics. All along it has looked just like the last vital, landmark election which was going to redraw the map of Irish politics. The only news comes when we find out that someone – oh, the frontrunner Enda Kenny, for example – is due a lump sum payment of €100,000 on a teaching pension next year. And that Enda Kenny hasn’t taught school since he put in four years in the 1970s. And now he’s nobly refusing to pick up the loot. What a guy.
But, apart from life-enhancing announcements like this from Enda, we are pretty dizzy from watching the same people saying the same things: they are even wearing the same suits. On the Eleventh Houron Monday six or seven grey-haired men wearing suits sat in a row, like starlings on a wire, to talk about one of the electoral debates. They did have the grace to look pretty uncomfortable. All over the country you could hear the delicate tinkle of eyes glazing over.
The people who have been out pavement-pounding are talking not about voter anger but about voter grief – whatever the heck that is. I’m only sorry we didn’t kill the lot of them years ago. Perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about voter shock. On Saturday in this newspaper Dan O’Brien was talking about our national passivity, the origins of. Dan, Dan you should have emailed, and I would have explained it to you.
It all comes down to the same thing, and it’s not a mystery. When you’ve got a lot of information – and Irish people have always got a lot of information – and no faith in any civil institution; if you fear that your relatives might have to go into an Irish hospital, for example; or that there is a shortage of full-time teachers in your child’s school because they’ve all gone into politics and refused to give up their full-time teaching jobs – then you do tend to stay indoors and watch telly. Or pour yourself a Scotch. Or both. That has been our response to catastrophe for centuries. Now is not the time to tell us that we’re wrong.
The canvassers know all this, of course. Born of this land, and all that. They know what we think and they know how we feel. That’s why they’ve gone that bit quiet. Friends over in Dublin Central say they haven’t seen Bertie in months, and they were used to seeing Bertie. They were used to tripping over him, even when he was taoiseach. They didn’t vote for him, yet they miss him. And, yes, they’re sorry they miss him.