Tidy Towns bring sense to election fever
ARE election posters not just an insult to the electorate’s intelligence? Like, what is it exactly they are supposed to achieve that a fiveyear track record in office hasn’t? And if the candidate is new to the local hustings, how does knowing what they look like suggest a suitability for public office? Surely a vote based on a nice smile, or a twinkle in the eye, is a precarious one?
This week Ireland’s unofficial election historian and archivist, Alan Kinsella, told The Irish Times that he believed the lampposts are an important part of democracy. They ‘ level the playing field’ and inform people that there’s an election on, because ‘not everyone knows, you know’, he is reported to have said.
Oh God.
Election posters are an attempt to subliminally brainwash the voter with face recognition, not so subliminally, plain and simple. They’re saying to pen-poised voters in polling booths: remember me, you’ve seen me before, no matter when or where.
That’s a Mad Men-esque way of doing business – establish a brand by saturation and ensure recognition by repetition, just like flashing cue cards to a three-year-old eventually teaches them to read.
Fortunately in Arklow, Aughrim and Avoca the Tidy Towns Committees have managed to clamp down on the practise in picturesque south Wicklow. In poor old Dalkey, the Tidy Towns committee actually had to threaten to remove legally erected posters in the salubrious south Dublin suburb, but after a bit of a kerfuffle they backed down.
It isn’t that politicians aren’t crucial to our society at both European and
local level. They are the lynch-pin of the democratic process and, in the case of the local council’s, definitely more requiring of people driven by a vocation rather than intent on a career move.
It’s just that posters of airbrushed mugs in public places are not a million miles from the murals of despots in the Middle East; they’re ego trips, symbols of who’s who and who might be, in terms of standing in our society. Imagine the outcry if, as a result of Google analytics, they started invading a computer screen the way they do our streets (probably not a million miles away).
At a cost €5 each (not factoring the cable ties or the time of the person up the ladder), that’s the same price as a McDonald’s meal, which would be better spent feeding the people lying in the doorways of the streets they number.
Politicians should leave the lampposts to the canines when it comes to marking their turf.