The dregs of the electorate

Now that the dust has begun to settle and the media are left with nothing to report  except Enda Kenny rushing off to Europe to pretend he’s Angela's (with a hard ‘g’)’s bestest friend and Eamon Gilmore rushing off to Athens to pretend he’s a European statesman,  it might be helpful to spend a little time peering at one section of the entrails of the south’s recent election. Or to be more precise, one section of the electorate there. Put another way: let’s have a look at how many truly lazy, stupid people there are in different areas of the country.

You’re probably chuckling “Oh, he’s going to talk about Fianna Fail voters” or maybe “He’s going to give the Blueshirts a kicking”. Not so. I’m talking about the section of the electorate that just about all parties would agree is a lazy, seriously dumb section.

Let’s take an example - the Louth constituency. As most of us know by now, Gerry Adams topped the poll with more than 15,000 votes.  Nice one. At the election, just over 70,000 people voted. Good again. But – and this is the important part , so pay attention – the Louth constituency has 99,530 people on its register.  Which means that some 30% of the electorate were so lazy or so stupid that, on polling day, they thought it was better to sit at home and nod off in front of the telly or grease the cat’s boil or do whatever it is that really lazy, stupid people do on polling day instead of voting.

And of course Louth isn’t an exception. In Dublin Mid-West,  where Mary Lou MacDonald was elected, over 20,000 bone-brained beauties stayed at home scratching themselves. In Wicklow, people are a bit smarter, or rather thre are a few more smart people: the dunderheads there compose less than a quarter of the voting population. It’s still a lot of people – over 24,000 morons. The Wicklow election was a cliff-hanger – remember all those recounts and knife-edge leads?  If even a fifth of the idiots who stayed at home had grunted, rubbed their eyes and gone out and cast their votes, they’d almost certainly have changed the make-up of those elected.

Or take Dublin Mid-West.  One of Sinn Féin’s most impressive candidates, Eoin Ó Broin,  missed taking the last seat by just over 500 votes.  There are over 20,000 bleary-eyed, dumb-ass non-voters in Dublin Mid-West. If one fortieth of those clowns had made the supreme sacrifice of walking to their local polling booth and putting a 1 beside Ó Broin’s name, he’d be a TD today.

You could cheer yourself up, if you wanted, and tell yourself  that things are getting better. They are, sort of. Four years ago in 2007, just 67% of the voters turned out and cast their ballots. This year,  70% helped decide who governs them – that’s a 3% improvement. At the same time, that still leaves just short of a million – can you believe it, a MILLION PEOPLE – for whom the thought of leaving their front room and  voting was just too much. 

What a shower, eh? The big question now is, how many stupid slobs in the north of Ireland are planning to stay at home paring their toenails on 5 May?