Does it matter if Simon Harris or Mary Lou McDonald dance a cringey jig in a gift shop or if Micheál Martin climbs awkwardly onto a buffalo on a buffalo cheese farm to catch voters’ attention? Fairly or not, such images have reduced some observers to face-palm despair, amplifying the notion that our political leaders are unserious tools insulting the electorate’s intelligence.
But what do we want from them? If the mood is apathetically bolshie among much of the electorate, it’s hardly more relaxed among the media whose overarching tone – at least up to Monday’s Irish Times poll – is exasperation that the election hasn’t “taken off”. As for the candidates, if they’re not scratchy and half-astray with exhaustion at this end of an election campaign, they haven’t been doing it right. This was always going to be the danger phase. Anyone paying attention to Harris’s frenetic walkabouts as long as five months ago would have predicted the inevitable outburst in a supermarket somewhere up ahead. The surprise is that there isn’t a lot more of it.
All human endeavour needs an off-switch, not least those that entail full-on empathetic engagement with a fractious public while permanently on camera.
Candidates are moving targets, political antennae on red alert. Leaders and ministers still on official national duty face daily judgment calls on trivia such as whether a dance-off is the appropriate use of a prime minister. The answer is that it’s not. What’s the point of it? How many people are delighted to see a leader up for a laugh versus those who find it embarrassing?
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It’s possible to be different. Interviews with master consensus-builder Angela Merkel about her new memoir recall her disdain for political showmanship and for social media, how her speeches were “aggressively dull”, how she never played for laughs. When a Sunday Times photographer suggested a pose for a close-up – nothing more flamboyant than her face resting against a raised palm – she said firmly, “I don’t want to do that”.
But would she get away with that kind of thing in Ireland? Think Bertie Ahern being mobbed at the Ploughing or getting a hearty laugh from a 2007 Irish Congress of Trade Unions conference - a few months after Irish voters had crowned his third election triumph and just before the crash – when he couldn’t understand why people moaning about the economy didn’t commit suicide.
Starstruck people are always a bit foolish and giddy. They laugh at their hero’s most pedestrian comments if delivered in a jocular tone. It’s human nature. Whatever else might be said about Michael O’Leary’s comments about teachers (and they do warrant a discussion), they were not remotely funny. Yet the resultant FG guffaws became one of this election’s “highlights” mainly because the whole campaign was so leaden.
So whose job is it to inject or find excitement in an election campaign? Is it up to the leaders who went mad on the promises and tried a bit of dancing? The candidates? Or is it the electorate’s job – those with the privilege of a vote to elevate the people they affect to disdain?
Monday’s poll suggests that despite the mountains of information being thrown at them, the Undecideds have not fallen; in fact they’ve risen to one in five.
Heroic canvassers hauling themselves up icy doorsteps have noted the alarming number of “not-ins”. Some reckoned that just one in five doors were being opened to them or found themselves regularly talking to smart doorbells rather than the residents. One Dublin Central canvasser talked of a strange mood of “apathetic bordering on angry”.
Yet some of the most powerful moments of the campaign are happening in Dublin Central. Watch Gary Gannon calling out the criminal/candidate Gerry Hutch. When Hutch, ensconced in leafy Clontarf while not in Spain or in Spanish custody, blathered that the sitting politicians had been doing “shag all”, Gannon responded as most serious politicians should but rarely do, describing the drudgery of day-to-day politics, the kind that will never be solved by someone pretending to be “some sort of saviour”.
“The dogged work is what happens after all the cameras switch off,” said Gannon, “and we have to go into the community centres, we have to go into the youth clubs, trying to find funding, trying to talk about the needs ... If Gerry Hutch wants to be a political leader, ask him where he was for the last any number of years particularly in terms around his own immediate vicinity.”
Anyone still inclined to dismiss the whole process as meaningless might look back at the first round of the Romanian presidential election on Sunday. That produced a shock leading candidate who is pro-Russian, extreme-right, has no visible means of funding, barely figured in opinion polling and seems to have conducted his campaign entirely on TikTok. It can happen anywhere.
There is a grace note to Election 2024. It comes in the form of the Cork care worker, Charlotte Fallon, who was made to feel “silly” and “stupid” after the Taoiseach’s abrupt treatment of her in the supermarket. “He is a human being and I know it was after a very long day,” she said after his apologetic 20 minute phone call. “I do feel for him and I know that general election campaigns can be very rough. I am glad we got to chat on Saturday”.