Opinion

Time to find a cure for electoral apathy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

Patrick Murphy
Patrick Murphy Patrick Murphy

The prospect of an assembly election next week has left many of us overwhelmed with indifference. Others, of course, have a more positive attitude. They tend towards enthusiastic apathy about the whole thing.

All of which suggests that we have come a long way from when we were urged to vote early and vote often. These days, politicians have difficulty convincing us to vote even once. So where has it all gone wrong for Stormont's political elite? Whatever happened to that bright, brand-new day they promised and why are so many now disillusioned with what passes for politics here?

The answers lie in Stormont's structures and systems, the individual and collective performance of our political parties and the continued failure of elections to make any significant difference to health, education or economic inequality.

Stormont does not work, because it was designed for politicians, not people. Based on the theory that sectarian war could best be resolved by sectarian politics, it encouraged two inherent divisions: one based on sectarianism, the other based on rivalry within the two sectarian camps. Both have reduced politics to policy-free farce.

The Sinn Fein-DUP rivalry in this election, for example, is based on whether Martin McGuinness might become First Minister. Personality rather than politics also dominates the rivalry between Sinn Féin and the SDLP. In the absence of ideological differences, some commentators have highlighted the age gap between the two party leaders as a significant issue.

(Maybe the age of all candidates should be printed on the ballot paper? Perhaps we should even include their astrological birth signs? Now, there's a new election slogan: Vote Sagittarius.)

Love of political power was meant to be the glue which held the opposing pieces together. Although it worked to keep SF and the DUP from a total fall-out, the frequent near-collapse of the assembly significantly eroded public confidence. Electoral support was further undermined because sectarianism dominated, and often prevented, social and economic policy-making.

For example, what should have been an enlightened debate on the nature and content of our children's education, degenerated into a sectarian dogfight. Meanwhile, the assembly failed to address child poverty, a point well made by the Catholic Church in its pre-election statement. Politics, the Church rightly claims, has become removed from the common good. On social policy, the bishops are now more progressive than our politicians.

The assembly's sectarianism might have been tolerated but for the cynicism of its five main parties. Scandals over Nama, expenses, foreign travel, failure to answer freedom of information requests, a glut of political advisors and the treatment of Jim Allister for raising these issues might have been overlooked, had Stormont achieved anything of worth.

Instead, it failed on major projects, from the A5 to Casement Park (which gained a new relevance this week in the light of the Hillsborough stadium inquest verdict.) Meanwhile, as the parties grew richer, the people became poorer. In the past year over 11,000 children received food parcels from the north's 37 food banks, while MLAs continue to eat subsidised food. Electoral indifference was spawned in Stormont.

The three smaller parties in the executive (UUP, SDLP and Alliance) complained that they were receiving a bad deal from the Big Two, but apart from the UUP's walk-out (soon to be a walk-in again), all three continued to enjoy the benefits of the system.

There have been two political consequences to all of this: one is electoral apathy - a sort of plague on all their houses, based on what the Church has identified as an alienation from politics. The other has been an interest in non-sectarian politics, mainly in the Green Party and smaller left-wing groups, such as People Before Profit. If Stormont is ever to be converted into a normal parliamentary democracy, the impetus will come from this sector.

So while most attention is focussed on how the executive parties will fare against each other, the political relevance of this election is how the smaller, non-sectarian parties will perform. Unlike in Scotland and Wales, left-wing parties here have the advantage of challenging a devolved administration which has largely failed to deliver. The non-voting half of the electorate presumably agrees with much of what they stand for.

If the left can gain a foothold in Stormont, it will add a new, non-sectarian dimension to the assembly. In that case, public indifference might move away from politics in general and apply instead to the culture, values and performance of the five main parties.

Now, there's a reason to watch the election results - and it could well be the cure for electoral apathy.