Fergus Finlay: Journalist Joe would have a wry remark over ‘political stability’

However, it would also have been meticulously reported and brilliantly written. I’ll come back to Joe Joyce in a moment.

I guess all I really want to say about our elections is two things: First, the elections are more or less over — bar the counting and the shouting. Second, the general election speculation has already begun.

The single most stupid thing our leaders could do is to make a decision about the next election before the hoopla has died down over this one.

RESULTS: GENERAL ELECTION 2024

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Barely before a vote was counted, the entire media wanted to move on, and already the headlines are talking about the pressure on Simon.

Here’s the thing: Political leaders who have to run an election barely two months into the job, and get as good a result as Simon did, are not under pressure. Not in the slightest.

He can, and he should, take his own sweet time (alongside Micheál and Eamon, if he has any sense), and keep the rest of us on tenterhooks.

As for me, I’ve never failed in the ballot box before. I’ve always gone down to vote knowing exactly who I wanted to vote for, and who I was willing to vote for — let’s say my determined first preference and the next few after that. I made a mess of it this time.

This time, there was also a long list of people I was also utterly determined to vote against — and I failed. I lost the will to live

Faced with a ballot paper like the wingspan of an albatross, I managed to vote from No 1 to No 12 on the European one, but couldn’t distinguish between the awfulness of the last 10 or so.

I just hope nothing happens on count 13 or 14 tonight to bring my silent ballots into play.

That’s one of the great privileges our system gives us that’s denied to our neighbours, with their silly “first past the post” thing.

We get to make a pretty sophisticated set of choices in our ballot box. They have to bring a sledge hammer into theirs.

Right now, there are two parties over there — the Conservative Party and the Reform Party — contesting the election against Labour, and fighting viciously against each other at the same time.

The Tories are busy running the worst political campaign in the history of the world, under a leader who seems more hapless every day (his campaign looks like a mass extinction event).

The Reform Party, on the other hand, has just been taken over by the most dishonest charlatan British politics has ever seen (well, at least since Boris), who seems — for some reason I can’t figure out — to own the airwaves. He’s certainly never off them.

The opinion poll numbers of these two parties are converging, at well under 20% each, while Labour floats serenely above 40%.

If those opinion poll numbers were to translate into reality on election day, and if they were to be spread anyway evenly across the country, the Tories and Reform Party would finish up by destroying each other — effectively cancelling each other out and winning no seats at all.

That won’t happen, although there is a real chance that Labour will get a thumping great majority with a good deal less than half of the votes.

It always makes me smile that whenever anyone criticises the crazy and undemocratic British system, the standard defence is: “Look at the political stability our first past the post system guarantees”.

Stability? Boris Johnson being criminally irresponsible throughout the covid pandemic? Liz Truss? The Tories fought the last election in Britain to “get Brexit done”.

That was a couple of years ago, but I haven’t heard a single Tory use the word Brexit once

The only reason Keir Starmer is able to say, again and again, that stability is the real change is because the Tories have presided over such unmitigated chaos with their first past the post majority.

If Joe Joyce would be sardonic about us, I can only wonder what he’d say about them.

However, Joe died this week.

In case you didn’t know him, Joe Joyce was one of the greatest Irish journalists and reporters of his generation. Twice journalist of the year in Ireland, he wrote mostly for the Irish Times and the Guardian.

He was also a newspaper editor and a columnist. When you talk about Joe, you have to use both terms — journalist and reporter. Facts mattered to Joe.

He wrote often about dangerous stuff, like the so-called heavy gang in the 1970s. If you were writing about malfeasance with the gardaí back then and you didn’t get your facts right, you’d regret it.

It was Joe who wrote the first story about how the gardaí treated a young woman called Joanne Hayes, and that story led to the Kerry Babies Tribunal.

I often thought afterwards that if they had let Joe run that tribunal, he’d have got to the real truth in double quick time and he’d never have allowed Joanne Hayes to be treated the way she was.

A great journalist has to be a great writer, and Joe was all of that.

Most people of my generation with even a passing interest in politics read The Boss, written by Joe and Peter Murtagh about a couple of years in the life of Charles J Haughey.

Even to someone like me, who was immersed in politics by then, it was a spellbinding account

It became absolutely indispensable to anyone who wanted to understand the dynamics of Irish politics.

On the bookshelves beside me as I write this are two of Joe’s novels — Off the Record and The Trigger Man — brilliant books that I’ve read several times.

Joe was also an editor. Years ago, at the request of the Commission on the Status of People with a Disability, he took an enormous pile of research and recommendations — the work of a large and passionate committee — and, in a few weeks, turned them into a coherent, seminal report.

I’ve always been in his debt personally, because he and his wife Frances edited my book Snakes and Ladders — making it twice the book it would have been otherwise.

I’ve known Joe and his family well for years. They’re friends.

With every year that has passed my admiration for Joe grew, because he battled a debilitating and long-term condition that shortened his life. 

However, he did it with the wry humour that was his trademark. Frances and his daughters know they have lost someone very important. They also know that Joe, through his work, clarity, and fearlessness, left everything better than he found it.