At the end of Seán O’Casey’s first volume of autobiography, I Knock at the Door, in summarising his childhood, he wrote “If he hadn’t gone to school, he’d met the scholars.” That sort of describes my own experience with elections going back 40 years.
I have never contested one – although that was briefly mooted in the mid-1980s before other duties to the Republic diverted my energies, ahem – but I have been a canvasser, a poster putter upper and served on several election directorates. I also once engaged in the old Irish tradition of personation, although not in this jurisdiction.
It was a long time ago and all that it achieved was to marginally increase the vote of a candidate who was never in any danger of winning. I think it was more a gesture of some kind. To not have used the polling card offered by the parents of a person who would have voted for the same candidate had they not been elsewhere on election day might have seemed an act of rudeness and even cowardice.
The first election I recall was the 1969 general election, during what was my first year in St. Peter’s Boys National School in Greenhills. I remember it because one of my fellow scholars had decided to bring with him into the classroom a poster calling on people to vote for Fianna Fáil.
I am almost certain that it was festooned with a photo of the avuncular Jack Lynch whom the populace was being urged to Back, as in Back Jack which of course was a shameless steal from the late American President Jack Kennedy. Anyway, our Jack did not survive the eagle eye of the formidable Mrs. Hennessey who for political reasons or other quickly consigned said poster to the bin, along with various insects and sundry other objects which small boys were wont to collect on their journey to school.
A few years later I recall ferocious arguments in my Granny Treacy’s house in Drimnagh when she did battle with her republican sons, my Da included, over her unwavering allegiance to the Blueshirts, also known as Fine Gael. Their successful candidate in 1973 was John Kelly.
For years she had voted for Maurice Dockrell whose grandfather had been a Unionist MP for Rathmines between 1918 and 1922 at a time when Granny’s brother Dan Hannon and brother-in-law Jack Dunne were members of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA. Said Dockrell, before opting for Cumann na nGaedhael/Fine Gael, would possibly happily have sent them to the devil, or to Ballykinler internment camp in Dan’s case.
I suspect if my later recollections of her are a guide that she responded to their remonstrations with something on the lines of “Well, at least he didn’t murder Michael Collins.” It would have taken a brave person to continue to argue the toss after that. As it took a brave Liam Lawlor who hurled with the uncles with Good Counsel and who once foolishly introduced Eileen Lemass, daughter in law of Seán Lemass, to my granny when she was running as a Fianna Fáil candidate for the local elections around the same time. I would imagine that Eileen’s knowledge of the Treaty negotiations and the Civil War was increased, and certainly given a different perspective, by that encounter.
My uncles were all at the time, with the exception of Declan who I suspect probably voted for the stickies, were Provos either by sympathy or a bit more than that, but they did not contest general elections back then. My Da used to vote for Seán Walsh the Fianna Fáil TD in the neighbouring constituency of South West where we lived who was from the same part of Kilkenny as my other granny and was a great man for getting all sorts of things sorted.
He did vote in the 1979 local elections for Paddy O’Grady the Sinn Fein candidate who was involved in the Robert Emmets GAA club but whom my Da was not mad about due to his antipathy, as a Donegal man, to hurling which betook us all back to Counsel.
My own first hands-on involvement in a general election was in 1987 which was contested by Sinn Féin who had decided at the November 1986 Ard Fheis to take any seats they were elected to, for the first time since before the Treaty. They need not have worried as the results amounted to what Ruairí Ó Bradaigh described as a “trail of lost deposits.”
It was a campaign not helped by the use of a large poster which urged the electorate “Don’t Get Angry, Get Even.” At the time I believed that this was sure to be a victorious rallying call to the struggling workers, youth and small farmers. I later discovered that the slogan had been borrowed either from the New York mafia or, via translation, from the Neapolitan Camorra.
At that time canvassers were allowed to hand out leaflets and otherwise harass and perhaps bribe voters right outside the gates of the polling centre. My post was at the entrance to St. Paul’s school beside the Greenhills Church. It was great craic in fairness and my Granny would have been greatly disappointed at the lack of fisticuffs and abuse even between diehard Staters and Irregulars of at least three stripes in her eyes. (She didn’t mind Labour as, even if they were inclined to communism, they were harmless and knew who to vote for as Taoiseach.)
The highlight of the boisterous and porter-fuelled evening was when the polling station was approached by probably the most notorious and certainly the most unpredictable and erratically violent local criminal – a chap among whose recent exploits had been the taking of the 55 bus from College Green when he became impatient to be transported home. None of the other passengers objected and he duly brought them to their chosen stops until the intervention of the Polis.
Anyway, as C strode towards the clamouring ward heelers we all watched to see which party he appeared to favour. I recall seeing a Pat Rabbitte (he then of the Workers Party) leaflet being contemptuously brushed aside. The same fate befell the tremblingly proffered advice to vote Labour and Fine Gael.
“Ah,” I thought to myself, “this may be a chap who has read George Jackson and become radicalised through his association of criminality with class oppression.” So I bravely stood before him and thrust out my John Noonan leaflet. He took it and crunched it into a ball before casting it away. “You fuckers shot my uncle in town.”
We were all intrigued by this stage and no one else ventured to solicit his vote. He paused at the gate, however, and took a leaflet from the hand of a woman plugging the virtues of Mary Harney of the Progressive Democrats. He said something approving to her and went on his way to cast his vote presumably for the party of law and order and free enterprise. Which of those appealed most to him, I cannot say. The conundrum that faces all canvassers trying to read the minds of the electorate.
Anyway. Vote early and vote often as they used to say in the olden days.