Dec 18 2024 35 mins 12
*****
Now that the dust has settled after the election, congratulations to all the candidates, all 686 of them. Congratulations to everyone from Pearse Doherty who got 18,898 first preference votes in Donegal, all the way down to Seán O’Leary who stood for election in Wicklow and got nine votes.
Pearse Doherty got that massive vote despite having two Sinn Féin running mates, who got another 12,000 votes between them. If Sinn Féin had managed their vote a bit better, they might have distributed it among the three candidates more evenly and won three seats in Donegal, but that’s a story for a different day.
And Seán O’Leary, who got just nine votes in Wicklow, congratulations to him too, and let’s remember that he also ran in Carlow Kilkenny where he got 26 votes, and Cork South-West where he got 27, and he ran in a bunch of other constituencies including Cork North-West where he got a whopping 110 votes bringing his total to 324 between all the constituencies that he ran in, so I hope that cheered him up a bit.
Click or right-click to download
Although, obviously, for him and the rest of the 512 candidates who were not elected, the election didn’t go the way they were hoping. And, by the way, let’s have a bit of humanity for them all. Standing for election is an unforgiving and brutally public way to expose yourself to the judgement of your peers.
A lot of the 512 will put on a brave face, and say that of course they weren’t expecting to win, but they are pleased with how well they did. Don’t believe a word of it. I have hung around with enough election candidates of various hue, and I can tell you one thing that they will never admit. There was not one of those candidates, not a single one of them, who didn’t secretly harbour a vision of being lifted shoulder-high as some imaginary excited journalist says into a microphone phrases like ‘extraordinary vote’ and ‘unexpected result’.
And I’ll tell you more. Of those 686 candidates, the victorious and the vanquished, not one of them, not a single one of them didn’t go to sleep with feet sore after endless hours of canvassing, imagining scenarios that would have them proclaimed Taoiseach for life within hours of the polls closing. One candidate who came close but not close enough in a previous election said to me ‘the despair is no bother, it’s the hope I can’t handle’.
All this brought to my mind something said by Luke Ming Flanagan years ago, that if you don’t like what is happening, then vote for someone who will change it. And if there is nobody on the ballot offering what you want, then run for election yourself. But as I say, that’s a difficult thing to do, and for the large majority of people who do it, it ends in humbling failure, but it’s necessary for our democracy, so that’s why I say congratulations to all of them, even the ones who I profoundly disagree with.
And that brought to my mind something else. I like to challenge ideas that are held unthinkingly, especially by myself. In the past, one of those truisms that was never disputed is that democracy is a Good Thing. You might think that’s obvious, but being accepted as obvious hasn’t always been the best determinant of truth.
And there are now people, some people, who are challenging this. Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal has written that he believes that democracy is not compatible with freedom, and that he prefers the latter. You might dismiss that as the view of just anothe...
