If Áras vote turn-out is under 40%, let’s have NO president

Well, are you counting down the days to the presidential election, now that the dust has settled and the deadline for nominations has ended?

Did I hear a collective ‘meh’?

Did I hear a sarcastic voice at the back suggesting they would rather count down the days to their next tooth extraction?

Yes, I’m afraid the race for the Áras (we’re 27 days from polling day, by the way) has turned into the kind of damb squib that gives slightly wet squibs a bad name.

You’re familiar with one critic’s description of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot as “a play in which nothing happens, twice”?

Well, this is a presidential race where nothing of interest happened, time after time after time.

What was your personal lowlight? The ‘in-out, in-out shake it all about’ Fine Gael dance as their initial candidate Mairead McGuinness pulled out, to be replaced by an identikit blueskirt in Heather Humphreys?

Or perhaps it was Micheál Martin’s slow bicycle race strategy, as he waited for the other contenders to declare first so the field was clear for Fianna Fáil’s candidate. When the Corkman finally got the wheels in motion, his chain promptly came off when he handed the garland to a Dublin sports coach.

The sense of underwhelm down here on Leeside was palpable.

No offence to Jim Gavin, but he didn’t even have the decency to appear in a few series of Ireland’s Fittest Family to raise his profile nationally before fully entering public life.

My personal lowlight of the phoney nominations war was when Sinn Féin ended months of dilly-dallying by dramatically announcing they would make a “game-changer” decision on their presidential pick in 48 hours’ time... only to declare last Saturday that they were pitching in with leftie candidate Catherine Connolly after all.

That’s 48 hours I’ll never get back.

If that’s how Mary Lou McDonald defines a ‘game-changer”, we need to have a good scan over her next party manifesto promises.

A little spice was added by various Cork candidates who expressed an interest.

MEP Billy Kelleher will be on every bookies’ list between now and the 2032 presidential election after throwing his hat into the ring, and having it thrown back, but not before running Jim Gavin a little too close for comfort in the party vote.

I would have loved to have seen Bob Geldof - whose mother was from Cork - land a nomination and shake things up.

Former lord mayor of Cork Kieran McCarthy also appeared on the fringes of the fray, and would have made a fine independent candidate. Had he won, I’m convinced the devoted Leesider would have moved the Áras lock, stock, and barrel down to Cork city - would there be room for the auld place by The Lough?

Away from Cork, conservative Christian Maria Steen brought the race for nominations down to the wire, with a last-ditch attempt to break through the wall of political obduracy and land a place on the hustings, but fell agonisingly short by two Oireachtas votes.

Her appearance on the ticket would have turned a dull-looking three-person face-off into a possibly fiery and animated four-person fight to the death.

Sadly, the political parties held firm and we are left with a fairly unpalatable selection, in my eyes, which is a sad reflection both on the firm tentacles of the political parties’ spread across the land, and on the dearth of suitable inspiring people who can take on the ceremonial role of President.

It seems we don’t do gravitas any more.

Cllr McCarthy had it right when he said the presidential process had seen a “tightening up” of “significant political control”, and “democracy wasn’t allowed to flow like it did seven years ago”.

Since 2018, the pandemic and social media hysteria have spooked the middle ground to such a degree that our two traditionally centre-ish parties are running scared of any nay-sayers and becoming, ironically, more intolerant as a result.

So, which of Catherine, Jim, and Heather will you vote for? Indeed, will you vote at all?

Having become an Irish citizen in 2020, this is the first time I will be allowed to vote in a presidential election, and I’m not sure I will bring myself to do it now. Perhaps I will hold my nose and vote for one candidate to keep another out - that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the field, is it?

The fall-out of this dispiriting debacle will be a call to change the way we arrive at our presidential nominees.

Nobody wants every Tom, Dick, and Conor to be allowed to stand, but there has to be an easier way for non-political representatives to vie for election to the Áras without battling to break through the three-ring circus tent erected by Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the left coalition.

In the meantime, I have a proposal as regards next month’s election, which falls on the Friday of the Jazz Weekend.

Voter turn-out in all elections in Ireland has fallen to historically all-time low levels in recent years.

The number of voters in last December’s general election fell below 60% - the lowest figure in decades.

The national turn-out for the city and county council elections earlier last year was 49.4%, marking the first time in the history of the State that more than half of the registered voters failed to turn out to have s say in a local election contest.

Meanwhile, the turn-out for the last presidential election in 2018 was just 43.87% - the lowest ever for a presidential vote, and an alarming slide compared to the 2011 figure of 56%.

These figures suggest a worrying fall-off in public engagement with politics - a feeling that will hardly have been helped by the closed shop system used to shield the three candidates in this year’s presidential race.

My proposal is this: If the turn-out in a presidential election dips below a requisite figure - say 40% - then the election is deemed void, and nobody gets to occupy the Áras for seven years.

In this way, anybody underwhelmed by the candidates on show would be registering a protest ‘vote’ simply by not turning up at the polling station.

It would surely increase the pressure on political parties to provide us with a genuine, stimulating debate on who gets to become the first citizen of the country.

The only problem with my proposal: It would require a referendum to be implemented - and what would happen if the turn-out for that was below 40%?!

Sometimes, you wonder if any of us deserve a democracy.