“Look at the Guard,” a mother says to her child in Irish, perhaps to impress upon him the importance of good behaviour. For we are at the crucial thirteenth count in the Galway West Dáil constituency, and this time…
They’re starting over from scratch. Again.
I have not the words to describe how boring this is. A few people are counting things. A lot more people are watching them count. That. Is. It. As if life had grown more serious in all the years since Sesame Street, but no more complicated.
There is drama here, but so deeply encoded that it’s a closed book to outsiders. Like a poem in Braille, or the heated debate dogs carry on via lamp post. There’s the Fine Gael candidate, looking tired, talking to the man who used to (almost completely fail to) teach me history in school. His brother used to be a Fine Gael TD back in the 80s. Insiders. Connolly’s cadre are the more numerous and the younger. (Unless you count children; I think the Fine Gael people have brought more.) FG coterie generally looks better off and better dressed. Though if the guy with the huge bunch of keys dangling beneath his huger beer gut is one of theirs, he’s really letting the side down. At one corner a veritable flock of men in dark pinstripe suits. Though they are without their gowns, I’d swear in court that they’re barristers. (Not baristas thank you, spell check.) Connolly crowd not exactly badly dressed, but somehow visibly socialist. This really is the ties versus the jeans.
Just a quick update before I jump in the shower. Why do people say jump in the shower, anyway? It’s a foolishly dangerous idea. I prefer to lie down and gently roll into the shower. Anyway, here in Galway West everyone’s a winner. We’ve outlasted every team in the whole country to become the last still counting.
When Fidelma Healy Eames was (finally) eliminated in the middle of the night, her redistributed vote elected Brian Walsh. His surplus made no big difference, and as this left three candidates and two seats the lowest – Catherine Connolly (XLAB) – was eliminated and the other two – Noel Grealish (XPD) and Seán Kyne (FG) – deemed elected. However as Catherine Connolly was only last by 17 votes, she called for a recount.
That’s how tight it is; they’re rechecking the valid poll of well over 50,000 to make sure 17 haven’t gone missing somewhere. It’s possible.
Of course if they do find it for her, Seán Kyne would be perfectly entitled to call another recount… We may be here for a while yet.
But assuming they don’t, the last recount begins at 4:00 this afternoon. Seventeen votes, to make the difference between a Fine Gaeler and a left-wing independent in the Dáil. Seventeen votes to overturn my pessimistic prediction, and make me happy to be wrong.
It’s all right for you lot. Through most of the country it’s all over bar the shouting. Here in Galway though – East and West – we’re recounting, recounting, recounting.
Recounting. The word falls like the rain. Grey cloudstreamers bring down votes, one, two. One, two. One. Testing. *Blink* I should have got more sleep last night. Oh wait, rumour coming through that Galway East’s last seat will go to Labour. Hooray! Here in West, we may not know who our TDs are until tomorrow. Even the seats we thought were won, Ó Cuív and Nolan, are up for grabs again.
It was Fine Gael Senator Fidelma Healy Eames who called for the recount. Understandably, when she was on the point of being eliminated. With only 56 votes between her and the next nearest candidate, she desperately hopes that a recheck of the vote will show that it’s him who should be eliminated, not her.
The fact that this other candidate is also Fine Gael will tell you a lot of what you need to know about the Irish electoral system. We don’t have parties, we have truces.
Uneasy ones. As I was saying, TDs are in perpetual competition. The question is always asked, can they ever actually pay attention to their real job of legislating if they are constantly trying to claw votes away from one another?
Then the question has to be asked, is that actually their job? Officially they may be legislators, but once they’ve elected a Taoiseach all they ever really do is rubber-stamp the bills that the executive creates. Perhaps the TD’s real job is to be at the beck and call of the electorate, acting as go-between with the civil service.
But then you must ask, doesn’t that make the TD a sort of useless secular priest, interceding for the citizen with government in order to get them nothing more than they were entitled to anyway? And hasn’t TDs competing as professional insiders only helped create a culture of endemic corruption?
Then again… other political cultures with very different electoral systems are full of corruption too. Perhaps we have more than most, but in return for it don’t we receive a fantastic level of personal service? I invite your comment.
This article is as a service to the foreign media. When you report on Ireland, you enjoy making us sound colourful, eccentric, charming, unconventional and, not to put too fine a point on it, drunk.
We constantly disappoint you by electing rather sober, technocratic parties full of lawyers, teachers and small businesspeople. Sorry about that. To make up for it, here is a guide to the more mentally individualistic figures in current Irish politics, who will live up to your preconceptions and help you bring home the story you came with:
Michael Healy-Rae: You will never find a crueller living caricature of the Irish politician. Not now that his dad’s retired. This man wears wellingtons in the office, and keeps a pig in the filing cabinet, under “Pig”. He can be called upon for a lurid quote at any time, though unfortunately you won’t be able to understand it.
Michael is the child of a farming clan who have survived by producing a much-prized vegetable product, the “Healy-Rae grassroot vote”, to supply insatiable addicts in Dublin. With changing tastes however this type of vote is no longer in such demand, and it should be noted too that their latest crop came in well under quota. Sadly for Ireland’s biodiversity, the Healy-Rae may soon be extinct.
Richard Boyd Barret: A Communist. C – O – M – M – U – N – I – S – T. COMMUNIST!!! (Repeat as per your newspaper’s style guide.)
Communists, like contraceptives, were once illegal in Ireland. Nowadays they are unremarkable, everyday things of no particular significance. Although you can never quite forget they’re there, can you?
Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan: An Irishman whose favourite drug is not actually a big dirty pint of black porter, Ming The Merciless is onto the smoke. Everywhere he goes, an exotic miasma lingers about his clothes and (yes) ponytail. From his very hall door there pours a cloud that makes people breathe deep and smile beatifically. He is even seen openly in public, carrying great brown brick-shaped lumps of the stuff.
Turf smoke. The guy is a fiend for it.
Brian Cowen (retired): OK, this one really is a bit drinky. But after presiding over the worst economic collapse in Europe since the Weimar Republic, I reckon you’d feel you could use a couple of stiffeners too.
Recount!? Who the hell called for a recount!?! Aaaaah. Aaaaah. Aaaaah.
Sorry, my nerves are beginning to go. But assuming that a big pile of Frank Fahey Number Ones doesn’t turn up, it’s hard to see it overturning anything.
While I still think that Catherine Connolly can’t quite make it, but it’s turning out to be closer – still closer – than I expected.
Meanwhile in Galway East they’re also recounting. Hence the expression, county Galway.
For the overseas audience, I should explain why our vote continues late into the night, through what appear to be endless recounts. Our system is called ‘Single Transferable Vote’, which means we only have a single vote between all of us. So we have to fight over it.
OK, I’ll be serious. We have a vote each. But rather than just give it to one candidate, we list the buggers in an order of preference. The count is actually a (fairly) simple mathematical game that transfers a vote from one to another until it settles into a comfortable position. The idea is that if you can’t have your first-preference candidate you may get your second – etc.
The system requires multiple-seat constituencies to work (you’ll see why later), the norm is three to five seats. Votes are checked for validity and counted, and the total number of valid votes is divided by the number of seats in the constituency. So say there are 50,000 valid votes cast in a 5-seat constituency, that gives 10,000. You need one more vote than that to “reach quota” and be elected.
The votes are then sorted into piles according to the first preference (or “number 1”) – which is the state of play shown here below, for the current election and the previous one:
As you see, Fianna Fáil did not get a majority of first preference votes in a single constituency this time. If we used a simple First-Past-The-Post voting system here, they would win no seats at all. Before you say it’s a shame that we don’t then, I should point out that if we did use FPTP, Fianna Fáil would have won every previous election before today.
Every. Single. One.
Under our more scrupulous STV system, their percentage of the seats will be fairly close to their actual percentage of the vote. (About 17%, the way it looks at the moment.) The system is as fair as it’s possible to be in this respect.
If none of the candidates makes the quota on their first preference votes, the next move is the elimination (or ‘exclusion’) of the lowest-polling candidate. The votes in their pile are transferred to whoever is listed as the next preference. (Each vote is a list, remember). If after this redistribution someone reaches the quota, they’re elected. If no one does, the next-lowest candidate is eliminated, and so on.
(In practice, several of the lowest-polling candidates’ piles will often be redistributed at once.)
So what happens when a candidate is elected? Naturally, they almost always get more than the quota on the count that elects them, and the extra vote is called the “surplus”. Say the quota was ten thousand and a candidate has eleven thousand votes. They have a ten percent surplus, so ten percent of their votes are chosen randomly and distributed to the candidate listed as the next preference.
(The random part introduces a slight approximation, but it’s precise enough with large numbers.)
If the surplus doesn’t elect someone else they go back to eliminating people again. And so on until all the seats are filled. It’s somewhat baroque but hey, it’s fair – and it’s fantastically dramatic to watch.
Its disadvantage? Multi-seat constituencies mean local representatives are in competition with each other – not just at elections, but all the time. Even when they’re members of the same party. That makes politics… different. More on this some other time.
Ah, thank you RTÉ for putting up the figures from the last two counts you missed in Galway West. Fortunately, nothing there has overturned my predictions. Connolly has moved into fifth place, but it is by no means over. FG still need more than they have for two seats, Connolly now wants a round 4,600. A tall order, but I think SF will have it for her.
I realise that I’m dissolving into Irish electoralese here. Will put up a glossary later. Anyway, it looks as if the Galway West count is going to shut down for the night now – still with no one elected. I think this is very poor form, and they should keep going all night for our entertainment. As I said to my girlfriend earlier, this is the only reality television.
Still, sleep also has its merits. I’ve been watching, reading and typing non-stop for hours now.
Other fun in the West – Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan (Independent) has been elected for Roscommon / South Leitrim.
Ming, because he ran as a legalise cannabis campaigner some years ago under the name Ming the Merciless – complete with shaved head and mandarin moustaches. Now he has finally gained power, and can proceed to destroy the Earthlegalise weed be a frustrated backbencher. Unless of course he pulls of a sort of anti-Tony Gregory and supports a minority FG government in return for smoky liberation.
Another weird thing about broadcasters in Ireland is the ‘moratorium’. Under this rule, they’re not allowed to discuss tomorrow’s election today. They still broadcast the political shows though, so right now we’re witnessing the unedifying spectacle of hot leftish forum Tonight with Vincent Browne studiously ignoring the most important ballot in living memory.
But what is there that doesn’t relate to the economic and political train wreck we’re living through? The only even vaguely topical issue they found is the mooted visit of the reigning British monarch, an idea so disconnected from current reality that you wonder if the media started it just so they’d have something to talk about tonight.
I couldn’t bear to watch. For the sake of TV, the argument had to be over whether we should actively despise or be really quite fond of royalty. Both unreasonable positions to my mind; I would prefer to simply not give a flying fuck about the British or indeed any monarch. I am a republican.
Not in the usual Irish – and certainly not in the American – sense, but in that I am opposed to inherited respect. So I would prefer if persons holding office simply by privilege of birth were not fawned upon by our leaders. On the other hand, she’s the symbolic head of a country with which we are trying to heal and mature our relations. If we do this right (as in polite and dignified, NOT flattered and awestruck, monarchophiles) it could – could – help improve life for people in Northern Ireland.
So I’m in a bind. In these situations, I’m forced to defer to Approval Cat.
Approval Cat, where do you stand on an official visit by the UK’s Head of State?
If you want to loudly use the word Fact! in your advert, you can’t also say that your product kills 99.x% of “all known bacteria including the flu virus”. Bullshit like that brings you awfully close to… The List.
The list? My unshopping list. Like a shopping list, except of the things I don’t want to buy. The saying is that one half of all money spent on advertising is wasted – only nobody knows which half it is. Well, I intend to show them. The wasted half, is the half that annoys me.
Advertisers you see know that if you remember the product, you are more likely to buy the product. It’s true. All other things being equal, we’ll prefer the brand we’ve actually heard of before. Why wouldn’t we?
Advertisers also know that if an advert annoys you, you’ll remember the product. And that is true too, obviously.
So some of them come to the conclusion that if an advert annoys you, you will remember the product, and so be more likely to buy the product. It’s just logical, no?
No. Because what they forget is, I will also remember that it annoyed me.
I reason that the purchase price of the product pays the advertising agency. If I bought it therefore I would actually be paying a team of professionals to irritate me – indeed, to keep coming up with inventive new ways to irritate me, actually do research into finding what really gets right up my nose. What rational person wants to pay for that? Hence the list.
It’s not a real list of course, I don’t write them down. I don’t have to because – hey – I remember them.
And I will boycott products that I actually like. You’ve got to be firm here. They stay on the list not merely until they stop broadcasting the offending commercial, but for as long as I feel they deserve. There’s a brand of low-fat spread I didn’t purchase for ten years because in 1988 they promoted it with a white man rapping badly. Really, that’s at least a decade’s worth. Some – a certain Australian retail shouting chain for example, an online operation that is not fussy about what cars it buys – will be on the list until one of us dies.
A couple of days ago I mentioned that I had to help a friend with a very sick computer. I’d run into him in Dublin, and he’d told me he wanted to add the drive from his old PC into his new one. I assured him that as someone with mechanical skills, he should have no problem. These things are quite straightforward.
How naïve I can be.
A day or two later he texted me. Something was wrong, the screen had gone mad and he couldn’t read it. I thought at the time he just meant that there was an error message he didn’t understand. When I saw it later I couldn’t believe it: Neat vertical stripes like a butcher’s apron making everything – including an error message – completely unreadable. Weirdest way I’ve ever seen a screen go awry.
But that only came later. First, while investigating the screen problem, he’d found a switch. A red switch. Red-for-a-reason red.
That’s right.
Just about any PC can work on the two most common voltages used worldwide: 110v (US etc.) and 230v (Europe etc.). Most switch between them automatically, but older and/or cheaper ones have – you guessed it – a red switch, on the back of the power supply. Throw this in the US and your PC shudders to a half-powered halt. Throw it in Europe…
Bang.
You know, I can’t be annoyed with him. Sure, they made the switch red so that people would know it’s not something you can just throw. And in most cases that works. But there’s another kind of person that it has a completely opposite effect on.
