my latest tweets! 
They’re back!
It’s election time again and the country’s lamp posts and telegraph poles have been festooned with an assortment of dodgy-looking mug-shots that do little to improve the view.
Let’s face it, by and large pictures of politicians aren’t pretty. Even the polished practitioners of national politics struggle to look good when their faces are blown up to poster-size and put on display. Local wannabe councillors have no chance.
One such unfortunate suddenly appeared on the telephone pole outside our house recently. When I went to bed at midnight the pole was bare… the following morning at 7am there he was, grinning down at the house like some voyeuristic lecher. Was this supposed to inspire me to vote for this man? Think again! It makes you wonder who’s giving these people their marketing advice.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t for the life of me work out how poster politics is supposed to work. Yes, it raises public awareness, but more often than not it’s the groan-and-cringe kind of awareness that does nobody any favours. And let’s be blunt here, on balance your typical local election candidate isn’t particularly pleasant to look at; it’s no beauty contest, that’s for sure. So what do you have? Just a bunch of ugly mug-shots sullying the Irish landscape, and for what? Do they tell me what these people stand for? Do they tell me what they plan to do for me, my family and my community if I help elect them? No, they just distract and irritate me, and if anything have the opposite effect.
Some argue that posters have been a part of Irish politics since the inception of the state… that may well be, but I maintain that just because something has always happened, doesn’t mean that it should be allowed to continue. Staying on a political theme, let’s take women and the vote as an example. It was 1918 before Irish women were granted voting rights at all, and 1928 before conditions and restrictions were lifted to put them on an equal footing with men. Should the status quo there have been maintained just because it was always so? Of course not; it’s an absurd argument… and the same goes for the posters.
So why persist? They’re an eyesore, they do nothing to promote the cause of the politicians in question and, from the admittedly limited feedback I’ve been getting, they irritate the bejaysus out of the electorate. Surely it would be better to invest the time and resources used to produce these posters into a more effective means of engaging with the electorate. I’ve seen more posters than I can count, and yet I’m none the wiser about the policies of those standing for election locally. It’s a joke. I need information — not un-pretty pictures — to help me decide. At the moment I’m simply confused… and I’m guessing I’m not alone.
The girls at least have found a use for the posters. They’ve turned it into a game to keep them occupied on car journeys — each picking a candidate and then counting how many posters of them they can spot before we reach our destination. The numbers they reach, even on a short hop to the shops, is frightening. But at least it’s a positive outcome, of sorts, for the money invested in producing the posters… the only one, it would seem.
A few days later I looked out to see that the summer weather had done its work. Pummelled by an unseasonably cold north-easterly and relentless driving rain the poster outside the house had blown around and down the pole and now resided in the ditch. I couldn’t help thinking that it was an omen of sorts — if he’s relying on his posters to get him elected I don’t much fancy his chances.
