The last election of the 20th century was a sad affair. Pencils swung aimlessly from old pieces of twine. Rusty metal boxes that once sang the news of de Valera's victories, of Cumann na nGaedheal or Clann na Poblachta, could barely clang in response to the few green or pink or white papers sympathetic citizens threw into them. Three different colours for three different issues, yet the best democracy on offer was same again, please.
The age of post-politics is finally nigh. It became almost cool not to have voted, judging by the people on one talk radio show after another who said they stayed away. For some, it was a laugh, but for all it is deadly serious: when people believe their vote does not count, the State may have no option but to confirm their belief.
No profiles tell us who stayed away, or why. No surveys indicate what might encourage the other half of the electorate to vote, if that is indeed the goal of the political parties. But even a cursory interrogation of who lose out suggests that the last group to do so are the people and institutions of mainstream politics and government. The less we vote, the more they can afford to stay the same. Why should they care? With the identity gap between political parties shrinking anyway, government - whoever it is - may soon be able to afford to play to a very narrow audience.
All weekend, politicians and pundits speculated about the phenomenon of the disappearing voter. Some 43.74 per cent had not voted in the constitutional referendums on the Belfast Agreement and Amsterdam Treaty last June, and it was getting worse. No conflict, no contest was one way of putting it; fed up with the lot of them because they are too corrupt/dull/self-absorbed summarised how they imagined the other.
Perhaps it is now the case that the best political statement Generation X can muster is a general lassitude, a sense of being teed off rather than being motivated to make change. In an age of interactive media, they may have a point. Why visit a polling centre when you can chill out better somewhere else? The centres themselves were a marketing disaster: the perforations on the ballot papers were the most hi-tech concessions there, the perforation being a more recent invention than the photograph, which was pioneered over 150 years ago and was now included for the first time on the Euroballot.
A neighbour tried to convince me that the pencil on a string was the same one we had used to vote in the divorce referendum: it certainly looked familiar. But if this was, in fact, a Ground- hog Day Irish style, things were not getting better. It is fact rather than cynicism that only political scientists will remain professionally interested in the phenomenon of no votes and spoiled votes for longer than this count.
Generation X was not alone in its decision to place a boycott. People who felt insulted by scandals and were angry at heel-dragging on issues from childcare on, refused to take part too, as this weekend's commentary realised.
They were joined in the Euro poll by millions throughout the rest of Europe. Yet specific differences here which enhance that sense of apathy or exclusion are worth reciting again.
Although some advances will be made in the wake of the local authority referendum and other schematic changes, Ireland's regional structures are profoundly inadequate compared with other European states. A so-called decentralisation programme by Government, that is close to achieving its target of over 4,000 civil servants working in offices outside Dublin, masks the fact that no notable powers have yet been devolved to the regions either through the Department of the Environment or through bodies such as the Departments of Education or Health.
The concerns I heard about a democratic deficit rang somewhat hollow. On this level of turnout, voting as it did, every mainstream party made strategic gains. Fianna Fail in general and Bertie Ahern in particular put paid to the spoilsports who worried about the effects of recent unusual interpretations of democracy - like the policy reversal on a PfP referendum - on their vote. The party machine partied on regardless, confirming to the PDs that their place in Government is becoming more one by Fianna Fail's design than by the PDs' own right.
The message to Fine Gael was potentially alarming, although it may instead be interpreted as a pleasant confirmation that the party is doing its usual job of holding the fort against Fianna Fail. Two years in opposition appeared to have had little impact on the Government vote, while Jim Mitchell's opportunistic pre-election attack on Mary Banotti was a kick in the teeth for any notions about overall party strategy. Those local election posters which called for "a new patriotism locally" - a version of John Bruton's downhome equivalent of the Third Way - hardly made more sense to floating voters than it makes here.
AT the time of writing, Labour would seem to have hit its future ground running by sending Proinsias De Rossa off to Europe, clearing a safer space for Ruairi Quinn's Third Way and for the power-in-waiting of Pat Rabbitte to cancel all other pretenders. Ambitious dissenters in the mould of Bernie Malone were taught a hard lesson in how all long roads eventually must turn, which may bond them and former DL colleagues working locally who have to fear the steady rise of the Sinn Fein vote in traditional Labour niches.
It is time to take the pencil out of Irish politics. Individual Personal Identification Numbers issued to citizens at the age of 18, personalised receipts or other mechanical and electronic changes to the way or place we vote could lure more people into the system. So much for the cosmetics of it. If scandals like Sheedy and the blood and money tribunals make no impact whatever on local or European voting patterns, the message government may hear is that they do not count as much as some think they ought, because they do not register at the polls. Those they most irritate or affect keep quiet.
The consequences are provocative. The spectacular rise of the lobbyist, added to the fad for focus groups, could confirm a situation where government becomes the art of balancing major interests, at the expense of minor ones.
A two-speed system for a two-tier place? It sounds familiar because the State has been there before in a rather different guise: odds are that this new hegemony, being less tangible, may prove harder to dislodge. Whether the subject is a referendum on PfP or a comprehensive system of childcare facilities, change may in future be reliant on the better instincts of those who govern us, rather than on the rusty ballot box we used to love.