Fiction of contrary Donegal ignores inconvenient truth

Lazy sneering has greeted another referendum No vote from Donegal and the people of the disaffected county find themselves dismissed as contrary conservatives once again.

Donegal voters can be forgiven for predicting they will be largely forgotten about by Dublin until the next time they buck the national trend at the polling stations.

Prior to the children’s referendum, voters in the two Donegal constituencies also rejected the fiscal treaty last May, the first and second Lisbon treaty referendums in 2008 and the following year, as well as Nice I in 2001.

If a Dublin constituency delivered such a pattern of negative results, the concern at Government level would be palpable.

However, voter behaviour in Donegal is met with a collective shrug of Cabinet members’ shoulders. Very little thought is given to the particular combination of economic, political and geographical factors motivating voters in that part of Ulster to say No repeatedly.

It should be said that the electorates of Donegal South-West and North-East are not entirely consistent. They voted Yes to the judges’ pay referendum last year, to the citizenship referendum in 2004 and to Nice II in 2002.

Donegal has the same economic problems as the rest of Ireland – it has just lived with them for longer. Soul-destroying levels of unemployment and youth emigration have blighted the region for years. The figures are beyond stark: the jobless rate among young people stood at 49 per cent this summer.

Additionally, companies declined in the past to locate in the Border area because of the Troubles. Nowadays, the infrastructure – which leaves much to be desired – is more likely to be a deterrent.

When did you last hear of a big jobs announcement coming out of Donegal? (Aside from the All-Ireland winning football manager Jim McGuinness’s appointment as performance analyst with Celtic, of course.)

Geography has played its part. Distance from the capital, combined with the dire economic situation, has fuelled the sense of detachment and almost dislocation from the State.

Sharing just a handful of miles of county boundary with Leitrim but otherwise bordering Northern Ireland can only have increased the undermining sense of living in something of an outpost or a forgotten county. The traditional emotional and financial attachment to cities such as Derry and Glasgow, rather than Dublin, can be easily understood. Although Sydney and Vancouver tend to benefit from the exodus of the younger generation these days.

Recent GAA success notwithstanding, Donegal people rarely hear or see themselves discussed in the national media because the county is, frankly, peripheral to decision-makers’ thinking.

Donegal’s last-but-one No vote, in the fiscal treaty referendum last June, was widely perceived as the outworking of the county’s new-found status as a Sinn Féin “stronghold” since the last general election.

Fianna Fáil previously dominated, with four of the county’s six TDs elected from that party in 2007. One of them, Mary Coughlan, was elevated to the position of tánaiste as the economic crash struck.

Sinn Féin called a No vote in the fiscal referendum but when it advocated a Yes in the children’s referendum the call fell on deaf ears. The two constituencies rejected both constitutional amendments by a similar margin.

The party’s TDs have subsequently found themselves in the curious position of talking down their strength in the area as they try to rebut criticism from some Government deputies that Sinn Féin failed to “get its vote out” despite publicly backing the amendment.

Sinn Féin has one TD in each Donegal constituency: finance spokesman Pearse Doherty in South-West and justice spokesman Pádraig MacLochlainn in North-East. But there are two Government representatives in the region, Fine Gael Minister of State for the Gaeltacht Dinny McGinley and party colleague Joe McHugh TD.

Prominent Independent Thomas Pringle and Fianna Fáil newcomer Charlie McConalogue were also advocating a Yes vote, giving lie to the spurious argument that Sinn Féin was somehow to blame.

The eleventh-hour exposure by the Supreme Court that the Government had misused public money on its information campaign prompted suspicion and confusion among the electorate in Donegal as elsewhere.

But constituents in the northwest of the country had been expressing real concerns to their representatives about the new Articles to be inserted into the Constitution in the days before last Saturday’s vote.

Blaming this on Donegal people’s innate conservatism is an oversimplification. The area’s relatively youthful TDs – four of the six were born in the 1970s – would argue that the county is not that much more conservative than other rural counties.

The situation in Donegal, brought about by years of neglect, contains a warning for the political establishment about disillusioned communities across the State.

Branding those who vote No in Donegal, Dublin, Cork or elsewhere as refuseniks and hoping that middle class elites in urban areas can carry the day in future referendums would be a mistake. Moreover, distrust in political figures of all stripes is on the rise.

Scoffing and choosing to remain in ignorance about what is influencing their voting patterns would be unwise.