WHAT’S the point of all those MLAs? If you wanted to be seen as public servants it was no way to gear up the electorate.
Just as the real poll hove to after increasingly excitable polling, evidence burst into view of incompetence and worse rewarded – in the permanent ‘government’ that is the north’s civil service.
Piled up over years, it suddenly rivalled disillusion with an assembly that coughed up legislative measures as its mandate expired. Not that this is fair to Green leader Clare Bailey and others sorely tried by mainly unionist obstruction.
Fear of sending an understated message, of being misunderstood or ignored, may still triumph over disillusion.
Who knows what unionists will do? Northern anti-unionists are bred in the bone stoics. Among those still voting who back in 1998 cranked up hope over disbelief that London and Dublin could or would stand by their guarantees will almost certainly, most of them, turn out to do their duty yet again. They’ll be saying never mind this stuff about ‘neithers’, we’re still here.
And the successor generation? What will they do? Peace-timers believe they were promised gains they cannot see. Some elders say they don’t know their luck in seeing only the scars of the Troubles, not its daily reality.
British local government votes on Thursday will compete for attention in London with almost any Northern Ireland outcome. Some this side of the water have barely registered the upcoming British election.
Fair enough. It will take a sizeable margin between nationalist and unionist votes, unmistakeable unionist dog-in-manger behaviour and instant drama to make British impact.
Misogyny in Westminster and disgusting male entitlement curdles any optimism about a thwack of bad results to bring this Conservative government to heel. Cowardly Tories who know how disgraceful their prime minister is want the vote to decide, rather than take action themselves.
It has to be a thumping defeat. Anything less will be brushed off as normal at this stage of a government’s life, fatigue after Covid, displacement of pain at the cost of living.
There’s something shared all the same across that Irish Sea border. A witty and wise hurler in the ditch, now bone-weary, looks at Boris Johnson and the Tories and sees them cannibalising their politics; ‘a bit like the DUP and Sinn Féin have cannibalised the Good Friday Agreement'.
Miserable weather for the last useful canvassing day on Saturday fitted the northern mood, though across the border politicians had their heated rows about turf and much else that turf stands in for.
Nothing so down to earth sets northern politics a-twitter. It’s nakedly high stakes instead, self-determination, a bid to shape the future. Possibly. Possibility is what pushes voters out of their own corners in spite of experience and weariness.
Nationalists will vote to make it happen, unionists to block it. Many probably won’t vote, the majority usually unionist. High levels of undecideds, say pollsters.
The canniest party managers off the record predict merely ‘holding the vote’. Whispered suggestions to the contrary are that everyone and their granny will be out to do their duty.
Vote to the bottom of the ballot paper is the practical advice on the doorstep, so your transfers are used to the full. Don’t plump, that almost forgotten, simple term.
Some canvassers are glad to advise, distraction and relief from awkward questioning. But over-washing the whole canvas in see-though grey is unfair to the real sense of citizenship and duty that helps drive a sizeable number.
It takes conviction to sustain political careers, though for some the conviction consists principally of self-regard and delusions of importance.
And to prospective voters perhaps polls matter but so does inheritance. Home fires have a way of rekindling from sparks.
Your granny would have said vote all the way down the ballot-paper. You might elect a first minister. Or a decent public representative, on the last count.
