April 15th, 2007
Vote for me! Despite being approached by none of the political parties and although my family and friends have done their best to talk me out of it, I’m still considering standing in the forthcoming general election.
What are my policies on key electoral issues, you might wonder? To be perfectly frank, I don’t have any. The economy is important, of course, but I’ve never been great with numbers. Hospitals are in crisis but if you saw the state of my office, I don’t think you would trust me with tidying up the shambolic health service.
Neither do I have a single policy for education, agriculture, the environment, enterprise or foreign affairs. There is but one issue close to my heart. On that I will stand and, if elected, on that I will serve. I am a single-issue candidate and that issue is free chocolate.
Chocolate tastes lovely and cheers people up. The dark stuff can even help to prevent heart disease. But, shockingly, we still have to pay for it. I’m not happy about this state of affairs. The government must be made to realise it can no longer ignore this matter of national importance. The manner in which it has failed to engage with me on this big issue is nothing short of disgraceful. So I’m running for office. Watch out, Bertie.
I realise, of course, that running for the Dail on a one-legged platform is a singularly stupid idea. In the unlikely event that I held the balance of power in a hung Dail, I might get my Free Chocolate Bill voted into law but what would I do then? As you may recall, I don’t have any other policies.
It is the same dilemma faced by every other single-issue candidate, but it doesn’t stop them putting themselves before the electorate. There will be hordes of them looking for our votes, all eager to waste our time and their own in a bid to attract attention to their individual causes.
Orla O’Neill, a member of the Newbridge Concerned Residents group, said last month she would consider running for office to fight for the disputed plan for a cinema at Whitewater shopping centre. Can’t you just see the trailer for that film? Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon would play O’Neill, gazing alluringly down from the silver screen as Voiceover Man intoned solemnly: “Sometimes you gotta take a stand. When the innocent people of Newbridge were faced with the hellish choice of renting a DVD or driving 15 kilometres to the cinema in Naas, one woman knew she had to act. She was the people’s politician. She was The Woman Who Saved The Movies in the Midlands.”
There haven’t been any further indications that O’Neill is going to get busy on the hustings but there are many more single-issue campaigners rising to the occasion. Just last week, fathers’ rights campaigners announced they were registering a new political party – the Fathers’ Rights-Responsibility Party – with the intention of running candidates in as many constituencies as they could.
I’m all for fathers having rights. I’m just aghast at the idea that one of these campaigners could scrape together enough transfer votes and spend the next five years taking up a seat in the Dail that could be occupied by someone with knowledge of, and interest in, more than one issue.
The disgruntled dads aren’t alone. Senior members of the Gaelic Players’ Association have also made noises about running in the election so they can further their cause of getting government grants for GAA players.
The Stardust survivor Antoinette Keegan is running in Dublin North Central because she wants a new enquiry into the 1981 fire that killed 48 people. Esther Uzell is running in Dublin South East because she believes her brother Joseph Rafferty was killed by someone with links to Sinn Fein and the IRA.
Last week, relatives of the men lost at sea when the Pere Charles sank in January said they plan to run candidates in Waterford, Wexford and Kerry so they can get the boat raised from the seabed.
I can’t begin to imagine the trauma and grief of the families and friends of those involved in these tragedies. But just because something bad happened and the government has not reacted as perhaps it should have, should not be sufficient reason for people to run for office to the national legislature.
Running the country is a serious, complex business and our public representatives need to be able to handle multiple issues. The Dail is just not the appropriate forum for single-issue protestors to air their grievances.
If the campaigners aren’t convinced, perhaps they should look at the records of the single-issue candidates that have succeeded in getting elected in the past. Tom Gildea won a seat in Donegal Southwest in 1997 on the sole issue of television deflector systems. He didn’t run for re-election after becoming the only sitting deputy ever to score a higher dissatisfaction than satisfaction rating in an opinion poll.
Last time around in 2002, Paudge Connolly and Dr Jerry Cowley were elected as members of the Independent Health Alliance. They promised to improve Irish healthcare. If they have, it’s not that obvious. Maybe we have only Connolly and Cowley to thank that surgeons haven’t reverted to operating with saws and chisels while any patients that survive recuperate on the floor. But I don’t think so.
So if you’re contemplating giving even a third- or fourth-preference to a single-issue candidate, please don’t. They can’t sing, they can’t dance, many of them look awful and none of them will go a long way.
