Jennifer O’Connell: Public right to be cynical about Irish politics

You know the pressure is on when the passive voice starts being deployed by politicians as a weapon of mass minimisation. “That is not right and it is not proper and shouldn’t have happened,” said Taoiseach Micheál Martin about the phenomenon of his party using fake pollsters to root out citizens’ voting intentions.

The explanations trotted out by all four parties in question for their involvement in the nasty practice of deceiving voters on their own doorstep through polling relied heavily on the Five Standard Excuses of all politicians everywhere for absolutely everything, as popularised by the TV show Yes Minister in the 1980s.

It happened a "long time ago" when politics was "looser", said Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney. It was, said Green Party deputy leader and Minister for Tourism Catherine Martin, something that happened more than 15 years ago, probably involving people who aren't even party members now. It was "inadvertently, maybe, a form of deception".

Sinn Féin's Eoin Ó Broin gamely insisted there was "nothing untoward" at all about the exercise, which was first reported by the Irish Independent. "We would have been a very small party with limited resources," he said of the period in question, a whole five years ago – a line that is a little hard to swallow from the organisation whose own director of finance described it last year as the richest political party in Ireland. It also begged the question of what parties might do with unlimited resources. Hire Cambridge Analytica?

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"It is part of our political climate," Ó Broin said, which sounded like another of the Standard Excuses, but actually was a depressingly accurate assessment, although Labour and the Social Democrats have both said they were not involved in such polling.

Even as Simon Harris was busy branding Sinn Féin's polling tactics "sinister" and "bizarre" over on Newstalk, his colleague Tánaiste Leo Varadkar was on RTÉ conceding his party might have got up to something "similar", though he made it sound entirely harmless and routine when it was Fine Gael at it. "Volunteers would have been asked to do surveys door-to-door, or students would have been paid to do it and it would have been done on a similar basis – anonymised for the purposes of polling," Varadkar said.

Meaningless description

“Anonymised” is a fairly meaningless way to describe a practice involving activists going door to door asking people who they will vote for and the issues that matter to them. Unless the fake pollsters’ memories were wiped clean, Men-in-Black-style, after every covert doorstep operation, it’s hardly entirely anonymous.

Much of the discussion has been focused on what happened to that information afterwards, whether the data gathered was purely statistical or if it was also personal, and if data protection legislation was breached as a result of this practice, something that is now being explored as part of a wide-ranging audit by the Data Protection Commissioner. But the prospect of voters' names, addresses and voting intentions making their way onto a database in Germany isn't even the most egregious part of the whole thing. Worse, in some ways, is the systematic deception of private citizens on their own doorstep to wheedle out of them things they wouldn't reveal if they knew who they were actually talking to.

Even last week, politicians seemed more intent on making excuses than taking accountability

In the case of Sinn Féin, party members were given fake ID badges and a brief back story to recite if voters asked who they were. Among the list of prompts included the instructions: "You are carrying out an opinion survey on behalf of the 'Irish Market Research Agency (IMRA)'. You are 'casually employed' for the day only. You will have a 'authorisation' badge." Fine Gael admitted on Thursday that it had also supplied its pseudo-pollsters with business cards for a "non-existent polling company".

This is not, as some party activists were quick to claim on social media, about the “mainstream media” whipping up faux outrage, or manufacturing a scandal. This is about obtaining confidential information under false pretexts for political gain.

‘Social desirability’

One independent pollster I heard interviewed cited the practice as a way to circumvent the theory of “social desirability” – the notion that people won’t want to be rude, so they’ll say what they believe you want to hear. Maybe a little deception is fine if the question is about which washing powder you prefer. But voting intentions are a whole other matter. It is up to citizens to decide if, and to whom, they choose to disclose them. That is the purpose of the secret ballot. There are all kinds of reasons why I might reveal how I’m planning to vote to an impartial polling company, but not to my neighbour the TD. Politicians know this; that’s why they devised the fake polling scam.

Would-be elected representatives should hold themselves to a higher standard of transparency in their dealings with the public, especially in an era of fake news and public cynicism. And yet, even last week, they seemed more intent on making excuses than taking accountability. It was left to legitimate polling companies to explain how this erodes trust and the promise of confidentiality on which their profession relies. As a reporter, too, one of the first things you learn is that you don’t misrepresent yourself, other than in very limited cases where there is a clear public interest mandate. (I can think of two: you’re either carrying out an undercover investigation or you’re a restaurant reviewer making a booking.) If you’re out canvassing people for their views, you should be upfront and say who you are, and let them decide whether to talk to you.

Politicians chafe when voters say they’re all the same, or that politics is broken and the system is skewed. But when they engage in practices which prove the cynics and conspiracy theorists right, they can’t plausibly claim to be surprised.