The day before, the party leader had announced that his party would not be supporting gay marriage but would be supporting stag hunting, as befits a conservative manifesto. Pablo had received an avalanche of tweets from gay and animal rights voters from all over the country who pledged never to vote for him in a million elections.
After passing round the tea and plates of biscuits, they began the interrogation. One, putting on her reading glasses, started at the top of her list. ‘Why is your party against gay marriage?’ she asked, while holding hands with the other.
‘Do you know anything about our party?’ Pablo asked. ‘We don’t support gay marriage because we are a conservative party serving a conservative demographic. Perhaps you should vote for any of the liberal parties. I can say with confidence that our party leader, if elected, won’t be entering into a gay marriage during the lifetime of the next government.’ The tea came down my nose.
‘What about the poor stags? What have they ever done to you?’ the other one asked. It had started to rain outside so I was happy to stay in that warm kitchen for another hour, which was how long it took to get through the questions.
Another morning, I sat at the back of Fourth Class in St Laurence O’Toole’s Junior Boys’ School just off Sheriff Street, where the main candidates in the constituency were holding a question-and-answer session with the boys. The boys meant business because they started the debate by gathering together in the middle of the classroom for a Maori haka.
The first question was, ‘Mary Lou? What will you do about the (dog) poo?’
Dog references were common on the campaign, with recommendations that the tail stop wagging the dog; how knowledgeable the dogs on the street were about precisely what was going on in politics in Ireland; how closely the life of a dog resembled that of a politician; how certain politicians were barking up the wrong trees, while making a dog’s dinner of the economy in general; and how many candidates wasted their time chewing on the same old bones.
Mary Lou gave the questioner ten out of ten for poetry. I was impressed with the rest of the questions but they didn’t rhyme. The toughest audience I had seen so far.
After a month of campaigning, headquarters looked like a military control centre on the wrong side in a major conflict. Unused posters were stacked in leaning towers. Weeks of newspapers that had been analysed for the smallest hints of voting trends lay where they had fallen on desks. Waste bins overflowed with demolished fast-food wrappers. Coats lay like dead bodies on the floor. The number of desks had increased with the number of phones, along with the number of those constantly relaying messages and instructions on them. There were five large maps of the constituency pasted to the wall, with different titles on each. One indicated the location of posters, another the streets to which leaflets had been dropped, another the End of Term Report Card23 distribution and another the streets to which the Five Point Plan had been delivered. On the fifth map, the largest, in a variety of colours, the rate of progress of the actual canvassing was highlighted. With one day left to the election, I would not have been surprised to find a monocled general waving a baton in front of any of these maps. All the streets had been coloured in with pink, blue or green highlighter pen. All was quiet on the Central Front as the canvassers were taking a very rare few moments to themselves, when the door opened and a complete stranger walked in. She asked no one in particular whom she should talk to in order to get her medical card sorted. We all pointed at R. While looking in the general direction of R, she loudly told all of us her gynaecological history, much of which was too technical for us to appreciate without medical qualifications. Someone picked up a pile of Five Point Plans, suggesting that we all head out to pick up the few remaining houses. There was a rush for the door. No one had cars so we took taxis to the front lines. I was reminded of the fighters in Madrid in the Spanish Civil War.
The Old Lady Rules
Most of the elderly female constituents have tiny dogs that bark while jumping up and down on the windowsill between the lace curtains and the glass. They are well practised at baring their teeth in a convincing demonstration of their horrible nasty little personalities. In dog language they are saying, ‘Look at me, look at me. She loves me and doesn’t care that I am such a little shit.’ I have a theory about these dogs. When their owners were young they hoped to fall in love with, and marry, criminally insane bad boys who would treat them terribly and make their lives a delicious drama of thoughtless agonies. Instead, they settled for responsible, hard-working sensible husbands who were fine but dull. They really wanted dull but liked to imagine they were into pain. When their faithful husbands expired, they decided to live out their early dreams of the wild life with these hairy little monsters. They come in a variety of degrees of hairiness and they are everywhere. These self-satisfied three-inch mutts specialise in biting your fingertips when you put flyers through the letterbox four feet from the ground. I imagine they have little trampolines set up inside the doors. Bastards. Smug little hairy bastards. But you should call to their houses because the votes of their owners are important. As you stand there with your fingers dripping blood, the little old lady says, hugging the grinning, mangy vampiric ball of fleas to her bosom, ‘Oh has little Fluffy Poo been naughty? Bad Fluffy Poo.’ Then she starts kissing Fluffy Poo! For the sake of the party you say, ‘Not at all’ and you risk your remaining good fingers by patting Fluffy Poo on the head.
You should canvas in the rain because old ladies then take pity on you. Pablo told me that during the previous election an old lady approached him on the street on the day of voting to remind him that he had called round to her door in the pouring rain, and just for that she was going to give him her number one. I decided to try this myself. After waiting for a downpour, I headed out to a small circle of cottages that formed sheltered housing for the elderly. I felt confident I would meet a few sympathetic old dears there. I knocked loudly at the first door and waited a few minutes. Imagining that the old lady I had in mind wouldn’t be running to the door, I decided to wait at least two more minutes. I thought that perhaps she might be hard of hearing so I knocked again, this time loudly. I waited another minute. Just then the rain stopped, so I was losing interest in my anthropological experiment. As I turned to go, I heard a bolt being opened on the other side of the door, then another, another, a catch, a chain and another bolt. The unbolting went on for three minutes. At last a crack appeared through which I could just see my little old lady – sitting in a wheelchair. I felt guilty for making her go to such efforts for my cynical trial. I delivered my spiel in a half-hearted way. Then she opened the door and asked me if I wanted to come in out of the rain because I must be soaking. I was wondering what the point was in having fifty bolts on your door if you invited complete strangers inside.
She advised me: ‘What ye need is some joined-up thinking. For that you need one huge computer and not just a lot of smaller ones. With one enormous computer you could have all the information on everyone in the one place. That way there would be no messing.’
I promised to pass on her advice to technical headquarters, wondering if perhaps, when younger, she had been in the cast of a Bond film.
The Rules of Voting
At last the morning of the vote arrived. I was happy because I was exhausted from following my research from door to door for a month. As the slogan says, ‘Vote early and vote often’, so I headed down to the voting station in the local primary school to cast my fifteen votes. This is not just voting. This is the proportional representation single transferrable vote system. There are a few simple rules involved. The easiest way to understand our voting system is to take a degree in political science. Failing that, imagine the following: there are fifteen candidates belonging to a variety of major parties or independent agendas running for election in a four-seat constituency. For example, let’s say that there are four parties each running two candidates and two other parties running one candidate each, plus five independents. What should you a
s the voter do in this case?
Totally naive people, or foreign correspondents, imagine that you are supposed to put a number on the ballot paper from one to fifteen beside each candidate’s name in order of your preference. Not so. Irish voters know how the system works. You should put a ‘1’ beside the name of the candidate who you believe is going to top the poll rather than the candidate who you necessarily want to top the poll. This information is available from Paddy Power Bookmakers prior to Election Day. This means that when that candidate is elected, your vote will transfer to another candidate as a proportion of their surplus so you will get to vote twice, in effect. Next, turn to the bottom of the list and, working backwards, place a ‘15’ beside the candidate that Paddy Power tells you has no hope whatsoever. You should do this even if you are related to that candidate. Follow the same method for fourteen through to eleven. You now have just nine numbers left. At this point it begins to get complicated, but don’t panic. If Paddy Power has a clear second favourite, you can feel confident in putting a ‘2’ beside that name. Again your vote will transfer to the next candidate, proportionally if not actually, but you never can tell so don’t worry about it. You just have to think positively. Do this for not more than three candidates in a four-seat constituency and for not more than four candidates in a five-seater. Subsequently, you should vote for the candidate who you actually want to see elected. Then give your number ten to their main competitor for the seat. Fill in the other numbers according to how the candidates look in their photographs on the ballot paper. My assumption is that you won’t want to vote for the most popular candidate because that is less challenging to your democratic principles or you are not the kind to follow the herd. I am also assuming that you will want to be directly involved in electing all four candidates. It is such a simple system I can’t understand why so many voters find it confusing. I don’t know why every country in the world doesn’t use it. The first past the post system in a single-seat constituency is just so boring. Anyone could manage to vote in a system like that. In our system we never know what is going to happen until the oracle that is Paddy Power has spoken. And the people of course. Let’s not forget the people. I voted. Following the principles of PR-STV voting, I gave Pablo my number one because Paddy Power said he was the favourite.
The Tally
In order to complete my embedded role with Fine Gael and achieve methodological closure, I begged the cumann chairman to allow me to attend the count as a tallyman. A tallyman is the prophet to whom the media refer in all their coverage of the election results. The tallyman knows before anyone else, except Paddy Power, who is going to be elected.
7.15 a.m.: You should know how to dress for a count. When I arrived at headquarters, hi-viz jackets were being handed out emblazoned with the name of our candidate on the back. One of our tallywomen refused to put it on, claiming that yellow did nothing for her. Apparently they were the exact same shade as the bridesmaid’s dress she was forced to wear to her sister’s wedding. ‘I swore then I would never wear yellow again.’ The rest of us, indifferent to our sartorial elegance, climbed into the back of a white van like a road repair crew in search of a pothole.
8.15 a.m.: You should bring a computer with you. When we arrived outside the Royal Dublin Showgrounds, the security man at the door asked the people operating computers to make their way inside first, but he couldn’t be heard above the noise of the growing crowd of tallymen and general hangers-on. Someone in the crowd shouted loudly, ‘Nerds! Nerds! The man is looking for the nerds. If you’re a nerd make your way inside now. Nerds to the front.’ A half dozen nerds proudly marched into the RDS, waving their laptops at security as proof of their nerdiness.
8.30 a.m.: When we got inside, we ran to our allocated few feet of railing to await the start of the count. The counters hadn’t arrived yet. A party of Fianna Fáil supporters passed by carrying a huge hamper of food. When they saw me looking enviously at their supplies, they shouted over to me that because there was going to be a ‘dog fight’ it was best to come prepared. Seeing my FG jacket, one of them asked me if I was a die-hard Blueshirt.24 I told them that I was not. Then they asked if I was even ‘gene-pool Fine Gael’. I also denied this.
‘Anyway come over at lunchtime for a sandwich. We have loads.’
9.10 a.m.: The point in tallying is to write down all the number one votes for each candidate. Each box of the one hundred and four boxes was emptied in turn onto the counting tables in front of the railings to which the tallypersons were attached. The votes were opened out and flattened into two piles by two counters. A tallyperson was assigned to each pile. They called the vote preferences to a partner who marked them off on a sheet containing the box numbers. The nerds, who were in a special nerd coral, in turn tallied all the sheets. The idea was that the tallypeople, who made all the complex calculations, would know who was going to be elected moments before everyone else.
Where the tallyperson is most powerful is in predicting the outcome of the tenth plus count that would happen in the middle of the next night. For this, you need to memorise the pattern of transfers from candidates who you know will be eliminated from the first box, and the next and the next, for all fifteen candidates. No problem!
There is an art to spoiling your vote. Someone had voted for candidates in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, cunt, 5, 6, 7, etc. We wondered if that would count. We decided to include it in our tally. Someone else had written a single word beside each candidate to form the fifteen-word sentence: ‘Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck could do a better job than this shower.’
A tallyman, who I subsequently discovered had been tallying for fifty-six years, pushed his way to the railing to check how we were doing.
‘Keep your fecking eyes on the score lads. A crowd of fecking eejits over there in yellow jackets are after making a complete haimes of two boxes so our numbers are going to be completely thrown out.’
10.00 a.m.: You should try to know what is happening seconds before anyone else. On our first break someone passing shouted at no one in particular, ‘_______ is gone. Dead in the water already.’
‘Jaysus,’ one of us said in response, ‘any other big scalps?’
‘Not yet.’
There was a general happiness at the bad news and delight to have been amongst the first to hear it.
10.15 a.m.: You should listen to the roaring of the crowd. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked after being deafened by a thunderous shout.
‘______ is gone!’
‘Already? No way. That’s amazing.’
The yell marked the end of an illustrious political career.
11.00 a.m.: Attach yourself to someone who knows what they are doing. I was being an apprentice to the highly experienced tallyman. He was conscientiously taking me through the numbers for our candidates after 40 per cent of the boxes had been opened. Pointing at columns of numbers beside each candidate’s name, he told me that he ‘wants to get him out, do you see? When he is gone his votes will transfer to her, but that might not be in time to save her there. But if I get rid of him and him – but their votes could go anywhere – I might be able to get him in.’
‘What are you saying?’ I asked.
He sighed with contempt at my ignorance, repeating for the third time a variation of how he willed the votes to go.
‘So you are saying he will win,’ I said, pointing to a no-hoper.
‘Christ almighty. What kind of fucking eejits are they letting in here these days? These are the four that are going to win in this order.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked, curious to see how red he could become.
‘Yes, I am fucking sure. I have been doing this for fucking fifty-six fucking years.’
He stalked off, looking, I thought, for a quiet corner in which to have a stroke. I rejoined my hi-viz colleagues to tell them that I had worked out, all by myself, who was going to win the seats in our constituency and in what order. They told me I hadn’t a clue.
11.30 a.m
.: When you think you have vital information, pass it on immediately. I met a journalist I know from The Guardian who asked me if I knew who was going to win. It had to be the jacket: the jacket of knowledge. I told him I was certain of the result at this stage. He took notes and hurried off. When you wear a hi-viz jacket, people think you know things like where the toilets are, who is ahead in the count, what did your man say, where can you get a coffee, who will win and what the quota is. I pointed out directions to obscure places, gave the first name that came into my mind and threw out any numbers that seemed plausible within three decimal places. I had become an info-maniac.
11.50 a.m.: When you are recognised as a prophet, you should try to profit from it. A fellow vizzer approached to apologise for his earlier outburst of abuse at my predictions. It seems that I was right all along because he just got the same view on his iPhone from The Guardian website.
12.30 p.m.: You should attach yourself to someone with better sandwiches than you.
‘Who has the hang?’25 someone in a hi-viz jacket asked. ‘I can’t believe it. No one brought a fecking hang sandwich.’
You should talk about the candidates as if they are all in an intensive care unit. Over grub we discussed those who ‘still have a pulse’. A candidate with barely a pulse passed by.
‘Did you hear how ____ is doing?’
‘Still hanging in there.’
‘I hear the Green is going well.’
‘He conceded defeat two hours ago.’
After another collective shout, we heard that M was gone at a distant counting island in the far corner of the hall.
‘Is she really gone? I can’t believe it.’
‘She still has a pulse but it’s very faint.’
‘You know what lost it for her? It was the hair! It was her hair that lost it for her!’
‘Do you not think it was her fourteen years in government and the mess she made of everything?’
How to Be Irish Page 19