I have always loved doing vox pops, because every single time you’re reminded that the true political winner in Irish elections is voter apathy.
As someone who writes and thinks about politics for a living, I’m neck-deep in the nitty gritty of this stuff. If you’re a Gript reader who’s reading this article, you probably are as well. Not just policy and manifestos but scandal, controversy – even the insider baseball stuff about internal party drama, and who got selected to run for what position, and who felt slighted by that, are all of interest.
So occasionally it’s good to remind yourself that most people are not into that level of granular detail when it comes to politics. In fact, many people don’t even know who their local TD is.
I was out on the streets of Dublin Central for many hours this week for Gript ahead of tomorrow’s by-election, and many of the people I stopped either thought the election had already happened and was over, didn’t know what it was even for (“Is this a Seanad thing?”), or had no opinion whatsoever. One guy was convinced we were talking about the vacancy left by Catherine Connolly in Galway West, while most just kept walking.
Two young fellas who appear in the video initially turned me down flat when I asked for an interview, saying they weren’t voting. I had to talk them into it because I figured that even that answer – ‘I’m not voting’ – would be an interesting data point. They weren’t rude about it, mind you – they just “couldn’t be arsed”, to quote one young man. And the same applies to lots of others, they’re far from alone in that.
All the election posters that were carefully drawn up by graphic designers and PR experts were nothing more than a visual nuisance for these people’s commute on their way to work. People often knew nothing about the candidates and were just going about their business, blissfully unaware of the scandals and hit pieces and campaign videos and photo ops warring for their attention.
In a way, the results of the vox pop are biased, because the mere fact that the people who ended up in the piece actually stopped to talk automatically means they are necessarily better informed and more engaged than the average person I approached. For most, when I asked “Do you want to comment on the election?”, the reply was just “Not really, I’m not really following it”, before they kept walking. The ones who did stop at least had some sort of opinion – most people have zero interest whatsoever.
And yet the handful who did talk were crystal clear about what’s grinding them down: housing that feels completely out of reach, homelessness everywhere you look, soaring crime rates, mass immigration levels that are straining the system, and the cost of living that’s hammering the ordinary person. You hear the same things over and over from people of the Left, Right and Centre of the political spectrum alike – the sense that the political establishment has failed, that the same old parties keep rotating in and out with the same incompetence, and that nobody is actually listening
One woman wanted Sinn Féin’s Janice Boylan and Gerry Hutch because she’s sick of taxes and people sleeping on the streets. Another lad said his dog starts barking at the mention of Labour, the Greens and the Social Democrats, and he’s throwing a wild-card preference to Malachy Steenson because “it’s time we get someone in there that really represents the people.” An older voter still believes in democracy but reckons it’s time to “give Sinn Féin a try” after a hundred years of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael failure. These are the voices that make it into the piece.
But they’re the exception, not the rule. The far bigger group – the silent majority I met on the streets – simply checked out years ago. And this isn’t some one-off thing for a low-stakes by-election. Last year’s Presidential election, the most recent electoral event we had, saw the lowest voter turnout ever recorded in a Presidential race in the history of the state, along with unprecedented vote spoilage. Hundreds of thousands of people chose to intentionally spoil their ballot rather than vote for any of the candidates on offer.
That should have been a massive wake-up call, but here we are again, months later, with the exact same level of demoralisation and detachment as ever – in fact, if anything it’s worse now.
I’ve noticed the same pattern for years now when it comes to migrant communities in particular. Many times I’ve tried asking people of migrant backgrounds to participate in vox pops in the past because I always thought it would be interesting to get their perspective on Irish electoral affairs.
But even many migrants who have lived here for many years, who have Irish citizenship and technically have a right to vote, don’t really know what’s happening politically and have very little interest in finding out. Obviously that doesn’t apply to all people, but in many cases, that is the reality I’ve observed. A lot of people from those backgrounds are not clued into politics at all and don’t even know who the Taoiseach is. They’re just getting on with their lives, and the Irish political conversation might as well be happening on another planet.
Overall, I’d imagine turnout tomorrow won’t be great. The voices you hear in the vox pops are coming from the minority who still bother to engage politically at all. The far bigger group who simply “couldn’t be arsed” have already cast their ballot for “none of the above”, and they’re the ones who are actually deciding our collective electoral fate these days.