Count centre 'like a Las Vegas casino, designed specifically to keep you in the dark about how long you’ve been there'
Became On The Went Eyed As Picture: Bleary O'grady Journalists John Days More
After a week spent in a Castlebar election count centre, on Thursday night — well 5am on Friday morning — I felt sweet relief as my head hit the pillow.
I won’t be going back.
Well, until September. Or October. Or maybe March?
Midlands North-West seemed to take on its own time zone in the last week.
It doesn’t help when you’re stuck in the same place from 9am until 2am for days underneath florescent lights that make it impossible to know the time.
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It’s like a Las Vegas casino, designed specifically to keep you in the dark about how long you’ve been there.
Sure, there’s no drinks on trays but there’s the occasional (and I mean occasional!) adrenalin rush of a candidate elected and plenty of heartbreak from people who’ve lost it all.
The hanging red curtain and ruby-painted walls give the place a Black Lodge-esque feeling, only missing a couple of statuettes and some backwards-talking count staff.
A glance into the media space reveals it looks thoroughly lived in. Bottles of water, cups of coffee, and cans of soft drinks litter the tables, and big packs of sweets and the occasional net of fruit are scattered around the place at random.
Journalists became more bleary-eyed as the days went on and by the end of the fifth day, not enough caffeine in the world could keep them awake.
Jokes that might have garnered a small chuckle on the first day became side-splittingly funny by day five, as the madness continued to set in.
You can sit around for days as you wait for results.
In Castlebar it took two days just to get the results of the first count in the Midlands North-West constituency.
This boredom, as you peer down from the theatre balcony into the cabal of counters diligently sorting papers, tips you slowly towards insanity as the clock ticks on and the sun rises and sets.
This is eventually broken by flurries of activity from the ground as the returning officer tap-tap-taps a microphone and you shoot into action.
It’s a count and you need to be up and ready go.
A media scrum with the eliminated candidate. A post on social media. 200 words of copy fired across to your editor.
And then, it stops again. The excitement dies down and you end up back staring at red walls, empty theatre seats, and thousands upon thousands of ballots sorted and resorted. It’s maddening.
Of course, Castlebar has its own delights, not least the excitement of potentially running into one of its famous sons or daughters (or maybe even being run after by one of them).
On one meandering, boredom-punctuating walk, I stumbled upon a bookshop, tucked away off the main street, owned by a family who are consistently in the news cycle.
Burke’s Bookshop is festooned with religious iconography, but also packed full of books, toys, and paintings.
I didn’t stick around for too long, however, for fear of missing an all-important count or becoming a news story in my own right.
As a Louth man, the prospect of covering Midlands North-West was appealing — it covered my own patch and there were an interesting and colourful cast of characters seeking the public’s vote.
While I had been warned about the time it would take to count over 700,000 ballots, I naively waved it off — thinking that they’d fly through it with little bother.
How wrong I was.
While the days did drag on and on, eventually the count drew to a close in the early hours of Friday, with celebrations from the successful candidates, while tired hacks and count staff slinked out the doors and into beds in hotels and houses across Castlebar.
Reading this, you might come to the conclusion that I absolutely abhor the count centre, but despite the hours and hours of boredom, it was all worth it.
Bring on the general election.