Query: what kind of electoral landslide is it when most of the electorate doesn’t turn up? Not quite a landslide, I’d say – more the shifting of shingle. To put it another way, in the Irish presidential election, fewer than half of voters turned out (45.8 per cent). Three in four electors did not vote for Catherine Connolly, the United Left candidate. There wasn’t much of a turnout in the previous election, of course, but that was because the sitting president, Michael D. Higgins, was such a shoo-in. This time, the stay-at-homes, at 55 per cent of voters, were way ahead of those who could be bothered.
It was a record victory for the Lefty, as we are being told, which may be true if you take her share of valid votes, 62 per cent, but is less impressive when you consider that she got just over half (55 per cent) of the total vote. What were those invalid votes then – amounting to 213,738 all told? Many were for Jim Gavin, the Fianna Fail candidate, a former football player, who had to withdraw from the election under something of a cloud but remained on the ballot paper. But most – 110,200 – were simply spoilt.
I’ve seen a picture of one of these spoilt votes (God knows if it’s even legal to take a picture of your ballot) and it was both coarse and unambiguous: a picture of a bum with the initials of the main parties on each half plus ‘SF’ for Sinn Fein, with the caption ‘2 cheeks, same arse’, with a box inserted at the bottom with ‘no. 1, Maria Steen’. There was also one ballot paper in Cork which appeared to have been used as lavatory paper: someone is not a fan of Catherine, then. Some of the spoilers made racist observations, which suggest they align with the people who rioted recently outside migrant hostels or who just aren’t terribly keen on mass immigration.
My cousin spoilt her vote too, for the first time ever, and given that our grandfather was a pillar of the Labour party, that’s a big deal for her. Nothing coarse, but she wrote in big letters at the bottom: ‘Presidential Farce’. She too would have voted for Maria Steen.
Steen was the candidate who couldn’t muster even 20 nominations from members of the Irish parliament to run. This was notwithstanding the fact that she’s one of the most recognisable individuals in Irish public life, having played a very large part in the resounding rejection of a bid by the government parties to remove from the constitution clauses relating to women in the home; she was also a big player in the abortion referendum (against). In short, Steen stood for the kind of Irish social and religious conservatism (she’s Catholic) which was once normative and which none of the main parties even try to represent any more.
It doesn’t make those voters go away though. And Steen’s failure even to muster 20 measly nominations symbolised for many broadly conservative voters that they don’t count. An awful lot of them either stayed at home on polling day or spoilt their paper. In the event, the election was between an herbivorous Protestant, Heather Humphreys, and the Lefty.
You can tell the nature of a candidate by her supporters, and in the case of Catherine Connolly, these included Sinn Fein, the Labour party, the Social Democrats and People Before Profit, a grand alliance of the most irritating people in Irish politics. There was a video showing the bloke from the Greens, the Social Democrats, the Labour party, People Before Profit and Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald joining hands and holding their arms aloft during a Connolly support concert in Dublin’s Vicar Street, which looked to me like a coven of witches, nicely timed for Halloween.
What will this mean for the UK? Well, not much, given that the presidency is a ceremonial role, though if you think of her as a composite of Jeremy Corbyn, Jess Philips and the Greens’ Zack Polanski, you probably aren’t far off. She’ll be a complete and utter prig. I can’t think of anyone less likely to go down well with the Unionist community in northern Ireland, which obviously doesn’t bother Sinn Féin one bit.
Let’s just hope there won’t be any state visits lined up, in either direction, between Ireland and the UK for the next seven years. Whereas Michael D.Higgins was all charm and civility when he came to call on the Queen, a visit from Catherine Connolly, if she could bring herself to do it, would be rather a different story. She’s very against bolstering the military capabilities of the EU, or any diminution of Irish neutrality, so let’s see how that plays out.
After her election, Connolly spoke of being ‘a voice for peace, a voice that builds on our policy of neutrality, articulates the existential threat posed by climate change’. Oh please. But there should be someone behind her in the victory chariot whispering in her ear, ‘one in four’ – as in, the number of electors who actually voted for her.
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