Cork Views: We can’t force people to vote, but we have to make it easier

And the winner of the 2024 general election was... the Apathy Party.

Yes, a staggering 40.3% of the Irish electorate didn’t show up at the polling centre the Friday before last to cast a vote - only fractionally fewer than the total amount who gave their first preferences to both Fianna Fáil AND Sinn Féin.

The Apathy Party really should be seeking to lead a coalition in the next government, but I guess that would be just too much like hard work!

Rather belying its name, the party has clearly been working hard and gathering support in recent times, and is surging from strength to strength as a result.

In the last general election in 2020, it mustered 37% of the vote, and in 2016, it was 35%. Go back as far as 1977, and the Apathy Party was on a lowly 23.7%, well below both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Now it stands on 40.3%, with all the indications that it will continue to rise in the years ahead, if left unchecked.

I contacted the Apathy Party for comment, and they promised that someone would get back to me by January... 2026.

Please excuse my flippancy on what is a serious issue, but I wanted to spell out just how poor a reflection that turn-out figure is on Irish democracy - and I needed to find some way to get your attention as clearly almost half of adults in this country find politics, power, and the formation of governments an almighty turn-off.

My question is: How high does that Apathy Party figure have to go, how low must the turn-out be, before action is taken to arrest the slide? I suggest we have reached that point.

And it’s not as though there wasn’t an effort made to mobilise voters.

A public campaign by the Electoral Commission to get people to register to vote - tagline: ‘Your vote is your voice’ - helped add 400,000 new voters to the register. How many of them applied for the ‘voice’ and then chose to remain silent?

The media - TV, radio, and newspapers - provided wall-to-wall coverage, and I can’t imagine there was a soul alive on November 29 who was unaware an election was taking place.

And yet hordes of people - one and a half million registered voters - made a conscious decision to abstain.

A few excuses were trotted out on behalf of the refuseniks.

It was a wet and miserable day, we were told. It was a lacklustre campaign, lamented some. All the politicians are the same, and the result is a foregone conclusion, suggested others.

That sound you can hear is Michael Collins turning in his grave.

How can we turn this around?

Well, in some countries, such as Australia, voting is compulsory. The system, introduced 100 years ago, has led to the country having one of the highest electoral turn-out rates in the world. Offenders who fail to vote are fined between around €12 - for first-time offenders - and €110.

Interestingly, in Belgium, which has compulsory voting, parties of the right want to abolish it, and parties of the left want to keep it.

It’s certainly a good way to concentrate the minds of voters, but I’m a little uneasy about fining people who don’t vote. It all seems so... autocratic for a democracy.

I also see how it could lead to some odd results, where gimmicky or joke candidates - even the odd gangland leader - are elected by people who don’t take democracy seriously enough.

However, what we can and should do to address the slide is try to make voting easier for people.

A good start would be to allow voting to take place over an entire weekend, rather than on one day.

People do lead busy lives, juggling work, family and social commitments, and two full days would offer a larger window for a trip to the poll booths.

The 2020 election was held on a Saturday, and failed to noticeably improve turn-out, but providing a choice of both Saturday and Sunday would be more palatable.

This scenario would also allow the counting of votes to perhaps begin while booths are still open, rather than dumping tens of thousands of votes on officials all at once, making for a more accurate and less strenuous counting system.

An election held over a weekend would also mean schools don’t have to close, leaving many parents scrambling for childcare at short notice.

Another way to improve turn-out in elections is to make postal voting easier. Many countries in Europe, including Germany and the UK, allow postal voting for all, and it’s particularly popular among the elderly.

My mum in England always casts a postal vote, even when she knows she is around on election day - she just likes to get it out of the way and not have to be fretting about getting to the polling station on the day.

Here in Ireland, postal voting is quite restrictive; basically, if you can’t be at the polling station on the given day, you’re simply out of luck.

There are only a limited set of circumstances where a postal vote might be available to you, and that’s only if you get your form in on time - the deadline to do this is a mere 48 hours after the election is called. As the latest election was called on a Friday, this gave people a weekend turnaround. Why make it so difficult?

Social Democrats leader Holly Cairns was unable to vote in her Cork constituency in this general election because she was only given short-term notice that her baby wanted out. Being pregnant, apparently, is not one of the exemptions that allow people to apply for a postal vote.

Others have remarked that the postal process is needlessly complicated and restrictive - for instance, your application form for one must be signed by an employer within two days of the election being called.

Several people commented on social media that they were away studying or on holiday on election day, and that wasn’t sufficient grounds to be granted a postal vote.

Ah, come on. We need to be doing everything we can to raise that dismal 59.7% turn-out at the next general election.

That also includes keeping an open mind about the eventual use of the internet to vote. Online systems have been trialled in a few countries, but most have decided against adopting it for fear of a security lapse... which makes me wonder if my bank account is secure!

Indeed, Ireland was something of a world leader on this front, and legal provisions were made for electronic voting in an Act in 2000. However, having spent €51million on the machines, it was decided not to use them as they were deemed too unreliable. (A government wasting piles of our money? Heaven forbid!)

Then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern famously railed against this and complained that Ireland was the laughing stock of Europe because voters still use pencils in elections.

But, if the technology one day allows, why not embrace a way of voting at the click of a mouse?

Until that day dawns, we need to extend the window for voting, and make postal voting a viable option for all.

Otherwise, the Apathy Party will end up running the country.