Leo and referenda botch-job cronies don’t get the anger
IMAGINE if this current Government of ours had to get something really important done, like a border poll on a re-united Ireland... We’d probably end up being ruled by Iceland by mistake.
Or they’d forget to print up the ballot papers. Or let Ian Paisley Jnr run the Yes campaign.
After looking at how they handled the referenda, God knows they’d find some way to feck it up, seven ways to Sunday.
We’d wake up the morning after the border poll to find that the Vikings were back in charge of Dublin and they’d somehow given most of Donegal and Derry to the People’s Republic of Tajikistan.
You might have thought it would be the decadelong housing emergency, or the crisis in the health service, or just the general incompetence and inaction that would have done for this tired and worn-out coalition government.
However, this really could be the first Irish administration to die out of pure embarrassment. That’s if any of them can be capable of shame.
This being Ireland, there’s nobody in a hurry to step forward to accept the blame for what went wrong with the Government’s campaign for a Yes Yes vote. Success has many fathers but a Feck Up on this scale dies an orphan. The people spoke, as they are fully entitled to do, and quite a lot of what they were saying was: “This is a right dog’s dinner and we’re not having it, thanks.”
The wording, the intent, the communication and the campaigning were all muddled and you sometimes got the feeling that even the ministers put out to bat hadn’t a clue what they were actually selling.
The wording of the two changes and the way they were presented managed to pull off the rare feat of annoying just about everybody, even the people they were trying to help. In fact, in the case of the care one, it was especially the people it was intended to help.
What the results also show is the anger and negativity out there which is consistently underestimated by Leo Varadkar and others around him who really don’t get just how hard people are having to swim to keep their heads above water.
Voters have been watching their cost of living expenses soar, their sense of security plummet and their kids either struggling to find a roof to put over their heads or just giving up and heading for Australia.
You might think that a politician’s job would be to know the people they want to serve but rarely in our nation’s history has a Government been more out of touch with the man or woman on the street.
They spent €23million on a showy campaign supposed to give them a bit of a positive kick in an election year. What they did was anger and confuse people and cast clouds over very important, real-life issues that are now lost in the dust.
There will be a lot of people in Leinster House now dreading the prospect of people going into the polling booths again. But that might be happening sooner than they previously thought.