No appetite for pointless vote

IT seems strange that a people who fought so long and so hard for the right to vote could have been brought so close to the point where we really didn’t want to vote at all, but that was the case right up to the point when Frances Fitzgerald resigned her post yesterday.

Frankly, we had better things to be doing than standing on a freezing cold doorstep being bothered by people who weren’t going to change our minds, smiling insincerely through chattering teeth as they tried to undo several generations of Civil War politics that had been written on our hearts.

Nobody wanted those old wounds reopened, or to see a fight outside a chipper at 3am on December 23 because somebody called someone else a ‘Free State Bastard’.

And what about all the posters – this is the time of year for tasteless festive tat and Yuletide advertising, not grinning politicians looming over us on every lamppost, watching our every move like Father Christmas if he was chair of the local branch of Macra.

So for once, the politicians have given the people of Ireland what they really wanted for Christmas – no election, and an Ikea that we can get to without having to navigate the Fury Road that is the M50.