There's a lot of weary cynicism emanating from the political columns in this weekend's papers. Dealing with the Tony Kileen affair Diarmuid Doyle in the Sunday Tribune believes that the junior minister was only doing what he was elected to do and that we get the TDs and the political system we deserve. Doyle goes into the familiar story about the thousands of pointless items of correspondence that are sent out from the offices of politicians every week which is based on the need to keep priming the parish pump. I agree that it's all a terrible waste of time and resources but I suspect that he is exaggerating when he claims that voters expect politicians to be at their constant beck and call. He seem to think that just because the electorate twice rejected attempts to change the electoral system that voters are to blame for this.
I would like to see reform of the voting system back on the political agenda. The alternative to PR-STV does not have to be a British-style first past the post. I would favour a mixed system where there are lists as well as geographical representation, like the German system. I admit that I grit my teeth when I hear the cliché "all politics is local" and that other old chestnut about elections being all about 43 separate campaigns in each constituency. But of course as things stand there's a lot of truth in both of those propositions.
Also in the Sunday Tribune, Shane Coleman muses on similar issues when he wonders "why should parties waste time on the big, national issues when people vote only on local matters anyway?" Coleman concludes that although parties have policies aplenty, they are irrelevant because nobody is interested in them, hence the title of the article "Personalities, not policies, win elections".
Of course, the political parties, and no doubt many readers, will dispute my suggest- ion that there are no big issues. What about, just for starters, health, crime, childcare, transport, the environment and immigration? Yes, all these issues are important to people, but will the general election actually be decided by them? Very doubtful.
With virtually every opinion poll, we are told that health is the people's number one priority, but it almost never seems to impact come general election time. A couple of constituencies have elected hospital candidates and in 1989, a perception that Fianna Fáil failed to understand anger over cutbacks in the health services definitely cost the party seats and its chance of an overall majority.
But since then, it's difficult to see how it has influenced elections. In the last general election, the Labour party published a well-thought-out policy promising universal health insurance. It wasn't perfect - the notion of free GP care regardless of a person's wealth is a bad use of resources - but it was a genuinely radical approach to tackling the two tier nature of the Irish health system. Yet it hardly got a look-in at the election, aside from mutterings from Fianna Fáil that it might lead to the scaling down of local hospitals.
Coleman admits that "the media are as much to blame as anybody" and that "we are bored by the detail in policies and, rightly or wrongly, believe readers or viewers aren't interested". He recalls an episode from the last general election where "a politician revealed privately to this columnist that his party knew nobody in the media was paying close attention to its policy pronouncements when a glaring problem with one of its key policy documents went wholly undetected".
In Saturday's Irish Examiner Harry McGee expresses a great deal of frustration. After listing all the different combinations of parties that can be ruled in or out in a post-election scenario he makes the following points:
Many months before a single citizen has cast a single ballot paper, the musical chairs game is nearly over. We are left with only three or four spots still available to plonk political backsides on. They are: the current coalition with or without independents; the Mullingar Accord with the Greens; FF and Labour; or FF and the Greens.
All of that is based on the evidence delivered by the one great nostrum in between elections – opinion polls. One of the working definitions of nostrum is quack medicine. Okay an opinion poll is hardly as fake as snake oil or as big a charlatan as a psychic or astrologer. But it’s amazing how they are taken for granted, as they contain all the great truths.
All of this horseplay is all very well but it’s leading nowhere. It’s all based on a misconception that somehow the polls are going to pan out magically just as the opinion polls predict.
McGee is dismayed by the fact that no new ideas have emerged to make the forthcoming election more contestable and is critical of Fine Gael's line on crime and immigration "which have smacked of populism". Also, Labour's two out of its five commitments revealed so far are unlikely to be election clinchers. There is a great danger that the perception that Fine Gael can be written off at this stage, as underlined by the poor showing in the poll in the Sunday Business Post, will turn the election campaign into a non-event as far as the pundits are concerned. Enda Kenny says the next election will be the "mother of all battles". So far his party has not demonstrated any capacity to wage a decent fight.
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