Áilín Quinlan: Voters have given you an earful, Micheál, I hope you heed them

The shopper paying for her groceries at the till in Dunnes last Friday - nicely turned out, early forties, a bit harried - turned out to be the canary in the coal-mine for the electorate’s lesson to the government.

During a bit of a chat in the queue about the presidential election, I asked her if she’d voted yet (this was before lunch).

She had.

“Who did you go for?” I asked, adding that this time I’d found it impossible; after all, Michael D, Mary McAleese, and Mary Robinson were no-brainers.

The woman hesitated.

She’d spoiled her vote, she said.

At that point in the day – still only mid-morning - I wasn’t aware that spoiled votes were already a thing in this election, but soon afterwards, I turned on my car radio to hear a tidal wave of speculation about what was turning out to be a worrying percentage of them.

The woman said she’d spoiled her vote because she was fed up to her back teeth with the government.

And Micheál Martin.

“As for Micheál Martin! Don’t go there! I won’t go there”, she expostulated, packing the last of her groceries.

She was getting up at the crack of dawn every day to go to work and pay for everything with the same salary, she said.

Every month it was a bigger struggle to keep going on the same salary with rising prices all over the gaff, and there were Micheál and his friends, expecting us to put one of their coalition buddies into a nice, cushy job in the Áras.

Nobody was listening to the ordinary person, she said.

This Ireland was an Ireland she didn’t know anymore.

It was a place that is, she declared, increasingly difficult to live in for ordinary working people.

At that, a cascade of resentment burst out in the queue.

About how supermarkets and the government think customers are so stupid they don’t notice the way food prices are going up every month.

“Every month, my eye,” someone said. “Every week, more like.”

About the lack of affordable housing to either buy or rent.

About the widely-held belief - true or not - that being Irish in today’s Ireland means you’re the government’s lowest priority.

About the insane behaviour on our roads where, every day, pedestrians are being knocked down and/or killed and motorists are dying because not enough is being done to enforce speed limits, or get a handle on appalling driving and abysmal traffic behaviour.

The government couldn’t be bothered either to tackle the roads or resource the gardaí enough to get a real handle on it, someone said. And people are dying every day on the motorways, in towns and villages and at junctions as a result.

Amen to that, we said.

“The country’s gone nuts and the politicians are sitting around soaking up those big salaries, watching it like it’s a programme on the telly.”

On the way home, I thought about the young adults being forced by property prices and the cost of living to stay in their childhood homes.

About how Ireland has become so grossly over-priced that a friend told me lately that he no longer orders anything from the recently-launched Amazon Ireland website because, he’s found, it’s so blatantly over-priced compared to Amazon UK, Amazon Germany or Amazon France. That he believed these problems were purely down to ‘gouging’ by Irish suppliers.

Jeff Bezos, hear his roar!

I thought about the fact that – and this is a small thing, but as always, the devil is in the detail – when I went to buy a twin-pack of streaky rashers recently, the cardboard sleeve that used to hold the twin-pack was now holding just the one pack.

I checked a few of them to ensure somebody hadn’t just taken the other packet out of my twin-pack. They hadn’t.

I asked a shop assistant who was stocking shelves nearby.

I was correct, she said. Those rashers used to come as a twin-pack.

The comments at the grocery till on Friday were, it turned out, indeed being mirrored in some of the messages appearing on voting papers.

They included:

“My voice is unheard.”

“Don’t recognise Ireland anymore”, and “Ireland is getting worse.”

There is an increasing tide of resentment over the growing perception that Irish people don’t count to their government, and that voices are not being heard by their government.

And, increasingly, it seems, Irish people, including me, do not recognise this Ireland as our Ireland.

So where does that leave us?

If, bizarre as it seems, spoiled votes is how the Irish electorate is expressing its disillusionment and fury with a government it voted back into power a relatively short time ago, that government should be sitting up and reading the messages on those spoiled ballots.