An Irishman's Diary

DURING FIANNA FÁIL’S Night of the Long Pencils, I’m told, Brian Cowen stayed up to the very end. Someone who was still with him at 7am in the Tullamore count centre reported that he was remarkably cheerful, all things considered. No doubt this was partly because his shell-shocked soldiers of destiny were holding the line there, at least. But he was also said to be thoroughly absorbed by the intricacies of proportional representation, on which he expounded with a detail nobody else could match.

Presumably the current Taoiseach is not as enthused as his predecessor about the concept of electronic voting. Nor, even after this election, does he share the Drumcondra man’s infamous pencil aversion. Having witnessed a number of his Dáil outbursts on the subject, I long ago formed the view that Bertie Ahern’s irrational hatred of graphite-based writing systems was based on some buried trauma from his schooldays. Maybe, like Homer Simpson, he had a crayon embedded in his brain (or elsewhere) as a result of a prank that went wrong.

By contrast, most politically involved people – including journalists – love the multiple intrigues of the manual vote system, even as they complain about how protracted the process is. Election counts are a bit like war: long periods of boredom punctuated by shorts bursts of intense excitement. But that combined experience creates a sense of camaraderie, in friends and enemies alike, that often continues on their return to civilian life.

Even among enthusiasts, an expert knowledge of PR is strictly optional. I don’t know many people, for example, who when pressed can explain how transferrable votes are chosen from an elected candidate’s surplus. But I suspect the system has some of the appeal of the old Latin mass. Most people have a rough idea what’s going on, and that’s enough. Having it translated into English might take away the magic.

Despite typically not having a complete understanding of how the system works, everyone in the count centre has an opinion. Once the tallymen have done their brilliant but simple trick of predicting first-preference votes, the focus moves to those oracles who can forecast the order of elections and eliminations, up to saying where the transfers of the third-last candidate standing will go. This is like boiling entrails in a cauldron and reading the steam, but there are always people willing to try.

When Sinn Féin’s Toiréasa Ferris was eliminated in the Euro election in Cork on Monday, the cauldron hinted that her votes were transferring to Kathy Sinnott at such a rate they might allow the latter to bridge the 9,000 vote gap to Labour’s Alan Kelly. I put this to a member of the Kelly camp who, while not expressing an opinion one way or another, offered a pearl of wisdom hard won during the previous 36 hours. “I’ve heard a million theories about transfers since yesterday,” he said thoughtfully. “And they’re all bullshit.” Such are the joys of the great Irish election count, and I’m glad the institution has been preserved for future generations. Furthermore, I believe the Government could do worse than reverse another attempted improvement of the process: the imposition of a cordon sanitaire around every polling station on election day.

I know the justification: that voters can be intimidated by party presences at the gates. But the circus outside polling stations added to the colour of elections past. And the competition between parties was a marketing tool for the event as a whole. On election days now, if you don’t already know where your local station is, you would struggle to find it. As Con Houlihan once complained, post-sanitisation, the modern polling booth has all the atmosphere of a suburban pharmacy.

I SEE THAT among the big successes of the local elections was Luke “Ming” Flanagan, who consolidated his position on Roscommon County Council, retaining his seat on the first count. How things change. Eight years after he posted cannabis cigarettes to every TD and senator in Leinster House (threatening to give new meaning to the term “joint session of the Oireachtas”), he is almost an establishment figure now.

In any case his triumph reminds me that the expression “canvass”, as in what politicians do before an election, derives from exactly the same word as the aforementioned drug. The Greek kannabis, meaning “hemp”, became an English verb via the process in which hemp cloth was used to sift flour. In time, it extended to sifting opinion too. So the next time you hear that your local candidate is “on the canvass”, maybe you should make allowances for his behaviour.

Elsewhere in our Elections 2009: How Ireland Voted supplement (June 9th), I note that Cavan voters had the wisdom to re-elect a councillor called Madeleine Argue (FG); that Fianna Fáil candidates who survived the carnage included Longford’s Thomas Victory; and that the balance of power on the new Limerick City Council will be maintained in part by a Long (Jim, FG) and a Shortt (Tom, Labour).

On a different note, I thought the sense of awed gratitude and humility felt by many successful election candidates is nowhere better expressed than in the surname of a Fine Gael member of Cork City Council: “Gosch”. And if ever there was an inevitable outcome to an election, it was surely in Wicklow; where a candidate called Fox (Ind) topped the poll, while Pidgeon (Green Party) was eliminated after the first count.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com