ONE of the peculiarities of the Irish electoral system is that you can see exactly how many people in your area fully align with your politics.
In the proportional representation system we use, each constituency returns a number of TDs and they are elected both by those who have given them their first preference and those who have given them their second, third, fourth and on and on.
In the recent general election, out of a poll in my constituency of around 47,500 people, 349 voted in their first preference the way I did.
Which I now realise I shouldn’t have mentioned as it it somewhat undermines any political analysis or opinion I might offer. Minority opinion or fringe crank.
Take your pick. In my defence I did spare a vote for one of the candidates who was subsequently elected and I do share my political beliefs with one of Ireland’s most iconic figures.
One of the other peculiarities of the system is that you can also see who people transferred votes to, that is gave their second, third, fourth vote and onwards, after their first choice was excluded from being elected.
Some of this is both amusing and alarming.
For instance, taking one example at random, in one constituency there was a somewhat notorious far right agitator standing.
He has recently been convicted of threatening behaviour.
He believes in such dark things as mass deportations and the bloodline of Irishness which, ironically, would put the far right’s adopted hero Padraig Pearse under scrutiny seeing as he is the son of an Englishman.
When this man was eliminated from the vote a large chunk of his vote, well over 200, transferred to a candidate on the far left.
This means that over 200 people had as their first choice candidate a man who aggressively opposes immigration and would break society down upon chillingly racial lines.
These people then had as their second choice a strongly anti-racist candidate who actively supports and defends immigrants.
A candidate who wants to divide people and Irish society and a candidate who wants to unite people and society.
A handful of votes might be explicable away as confused but well over 200 suggests a level of incoherence that, yes, is somewhat funny but it is also dangerous.
It is that incoherence that might explain why people in benighted communities would vote in large numbers for the named head of an organised crime faction in the hope that the very people who helped run a neglected community into the ground might be the people to rescue it.
On election day itself I drove an elderly person to the voting centre.
She told me her lift had let her down so knowing her for a good few years I was happy to take her along.
At the polling station she was sent to a few different people and there seemed to be some confusion before she was allowed to go into the booth and register her vote. She was very determined to do so.
Irish democracy is only around a hundred years old. Recent events and different global events have shown us just how fragile democracy is.
We can take democracy for granted. We can take it as a mundane thing. But I wouldn’t like to think where we would be without it.
The fact, then, that only around 60 per cent of the Irish electorate turned out to vote is really quite astonishing.
I presume that some of those may have intentionally opted out, that is made an active decision not to be active.
That in itself is quite concerning but it would also seem that a large portion of the Irish electorate just don’t care. They couldn’t be bothered. They have other things to do. An endless list of things to do that precludes the few minutes it actually takes to vote.
Why is that? A failure of social education? Lack of social engagement? A lack of the very idea of civil or community life?
It’s very easy to blame politics itself and blame the cynical trading of principles but shouldn’t people have a responsibility themselves?
If an older generation still cherish their vote and will go out of their way to practice it shouldn’t younger generations be put on the spot as to why they can’t be bothered?
We’ve all heard the, oh, nothing changes, or, oh, they’re all the same, mantra but that’s a great excuse for not thinking, isn’t it? A great reason to throw away the precious rights we have.
See More: Election, Ireland, Joe Horgan
