Irish Examiner view: Enjoy a small moment of calm after election day
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Well, that’s done then. All we have to do now is wait. And then wait some more, while the political dance cards fill up.
Ireland’s electoral system usually ensures that there is something of a pregnant pause between the closure at the polling booths and the emergence of a new government. That can either be a period of fretfulness and fingernail biting or a small moment of calm.
Our advice is to enjoy the hiatus, and all the more so because the prevailing narrative seems to be that there hasn’t been much fun or novelty in this campaign. “Staid,” said . “Lacklustre,” it added. The campaign has been variously described as “tepid”, “unremarkable”, and “dismal”.
There is, perhaps, a limit to the levels of political excitement we should desire in a world where so much of our lives are influenced by financial markets, global corporations, and the activities of maverick states.
With such mega forces on the loose, we might, also, develop more realistic expectations of the influence that domestic politicians can wield, and of the agency that we have over our lives.
This has not been a comfortable year for incumbent governments, with notable results the world over. Joe Biden/Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the US were the biggest casualties. The Conservatives and their multiple prime ministers were unceremoniously flung out by the UK.
The ANC lost its ruling majority in South Africa. Narendra Modi’s BJP was forced in to an unprecedented coalition in India.
Next off the starting grid, after Ireland, will be Germany, where the beleaguered Social Democrat leader, chancellor Olaf Scholz, will take his party in to elections next February in which the far-right AfD is expected to perform well.
Against this unpromising background, it was probably unrealistic to expect a ‘continuity’ candidate — which is how Taoiseach Simon Harris presented himself — to do well.
Whether the Irish election has been quite as dull as thrill-seeking pundits try to make out is open to argument. A campaign that features a notorious gang figurehead as an official candidate in one of the most fiercely contested seats of the capital cannot truly be said to be totally devoid of entertainment value.
And there’s irony in a political leader who prided himself on his social media skills — to the extent that he cultivated an image as the TikTok Taoiseach — being undone by a viral moment at a supermarket in Kanturk.
Social media, as a commentator observed in the at the start of the campaign, “has always been about the cult of personality”.
Unfortunately, as far as Simon Harris was concerned, on this occasion it was someone else’s personality.
Democracy is the worst form of government until you consider the alternatives, it has been said. The same person is also reputed to have claimed that: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
That oracle was Winston Churchill, demonstrating the important political skill of riding two horses at the same time, a useful attribute if you want to spend a life in the circus. He was born 150 years ago today.
Tomorrow, we will gain a greater understanding of the future government of Ireland, and how it may be configured to address the considerable challenges of the next few years. For now, take a breath.
One of the big worries before the general election campaign was the danger of the distribution of malign and mischievous information designed to subvert our democratic processes.
With one or two minor exceptions, this appears not to have happened, or, if it has, the details have not been made public.
And that is just as well, because the protections envisaged by the Government to maintain the integrity of campaigns are yet to be implemented.
Those powers will allow An Coimisiún Toghcháin (the Electoral Commission) to order social media platforms to take down misinformation, disinformation, or material that is damaging to elections and also enable it to regulate political advertising online.
The provisions, which are contained in the Electoral Reform Act 2022, have not yet commenced, due to a “number of concerns” that were raised by the European Commission.
Several parties in the Republic confirmed that fake accounts were proliferating on Bluesky, the micro-blogging social-network service which is increasingly being used as an alternative to X, formerly Twitter.
Fake Bluesky accounts appear to have been suspended, including those for Micheál Martin and Simon Harris, and for the Social Democrats and Aontú.
Others, including those for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, were deleted entirely.
The commission has a voluntary framework on online electoral-process information, political advertising, and deceptive AI content that is specific to this general election. The framework has been agreed with a number of social-media platforms, but Bluesky is not one of these.
No real harm has been done, or so it seems, but it has been a useful reminder as to why watchdogs need statutory teeth.
The 50th anniversary of the Birmingham pub bombings of November 21, 1974, can be marked for a number of reasons, including that the attack had long-lasting repercussions on the relationship between Irish people and the British police.
The mid-evening explosions at the Tavern in the Town and Mulberry Bush pubs, in the city centre, killed 21 people and injured 182. The atrocity remains Britain’s biggest unsolved murder case. An inquest in 2019 decided that the acts were carried out by the IRA.
These terrible killings also produced the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Six men, five from Belfast and one from Derry, long-term residents of Birmingham, were given life sentences for a crime they did not commit. It took until 1991 for the Court of Appeal to quash their convictions.
The prosecution of the Birmingham Six depended greatly on confessions that, it transpired, had been beaten out of them. There were major contradictions in their evidence: They couldn’t agree about the locations of the bombs, the types of bags they were carried in, and which suspects went to which pubs. They couldn’t explain where the devices had come from, or who had made them.
At their successful appeal, 17 years later, it was revealed that investigating officers had been updating their supposedly contemporaneous notebooks right up to the start of the original trial.
The only other substantial evidence was forensic, and this, too, was eventually proven to be hopelessly flawed.
There is no doubt that the Birmingham bombings were an IRA operation.
Chris Mullin, journalist and former government minister under Tony Blair, campaigned extensively to clear the names of the Birmingham Six, and, this year, named three of the four actual perpetrators in an updated version of his book Error of Judgement.
He also knows the name of the fourth member of the gang, who he describes as “the young planter”, and has fought a successful legal battle to prevent being forced to reveal his source and identity. While two of the bomb team have died, the two others are living in the Republic.
In Birmingham, where more than 100,000 Irish people were living at the time of the attack, the campaign group Justice for the 21 continues to press for a full public inquiry.
As we know, such campaigning is capable of maintaining momentum for decades.
One need only think of the Hillsborough campaigners and the Stardust inquiry to appreciate that only truth brings closure. It is likely that fuller accounts will have to be provided about what happened in Birmingham.
What we can say, however, is that 1974 was the year that widespread belief in the objectivity and fairness of ‘British justice’ began to recede. It was also the year that the wrong people were arrested for the Guildford pub bombings and the M62 coach bomb and incarcerated for various periods up to 1991.
Both the dead, and the innocent accused, can be seen to be victims of these IRA campaigns.
However, while the reputation of British security and enforcement services may not have been the primary target, the events caused lasting damage. The tarnish remains to this day.