Suzanne Harrington: Don't vote when you're angry, that's how Brexit happened

Anti-Brexit protestor Steve Bray outside the Houses of Parliament in London.

Putting the word 'general' in front of the word 'election' makes it a bit more swashbuckling.

Unless you are governed by someone like Putin, it signifies the possibility of regime change. 

In the UK, the national mood has moved from catatonic hopelessness to something verging on chirpy as the Tory-ravaged nation has a chance to finally oust those Eton gurriers on July 4.

Local elections, on the other hand, seem to be all about bins and parking.

Except the ones coming up this Friday in Ireland are bigger than that: they’re a barometer of the national mood, an indication of where people are at.

Pissed off is where many, many Irish people are at, as basic needs such as housing, health and ordinary everyday essentials continue to be either stratospherically overpriced or unavailable or both.

And when a population has genuine grievances, it creates a perfect breeding ground for fake-ass populists to proliferate like fungus in the fridge, with their soundbites and their scapegoating and their social media savvy, their seductive promises that they can sort what mainstream politics cannot.

This is what happened in 2016 in the UK and the US. The results (Brexit and Trump) are all the proof we need about what happens when fed-up citizens vote for charlatans, crooks and lunatics, who serve up tweets instead of policies, headlines instead of strategies.

This desire to angry-vote, to emote-vote, while understandable (it’s cathartic, like slamming a door, and just as short-lived) in the medium and longer-term spells disaster.

Just look at Trump’s America, Orban’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil. 

Populist conmen don’t actually have any answers for complex issues such as say, immigration or pandemics. They just have soundbites and the basic ability to rouse a rabble, to generate hate.

Nearer home, imagine what it felt like to wake up one morning in 2016 to your phone telling you that Brexit had happened, thanks to the angry-votes of a few thousand pissed-off people who had been criminally misled by a bunch of self-serving liars; liars who then melted into the background like pantomime villains, watching as the imaginary rivers of blood turned to actual rivers of shit.

You could not make this stuff up, and yet eight years later, that door-slamming vote continues to impact every aspect of the UK, from the economy to airport queues. 

Voting matters, and who you vote for matters even more. 

Ireland is polarising at lightning speed since the last election of 2019, and if we’re not careful, we may end up self-inducing our own Brexit/Trump moment.

This, in a country which has steadily been decolonising itself for decades now, making Ireland a small beacon of progressive positivity amid a sea of right-wing surge, would be a disaster.

Angry-voting for scape-goaters does not work, has never worked. History tells us that repeatedly. 

If you can’t imagine a modern Ireland fallen to the far right, read Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. It’s terrifying, because it’s so ordinary.

Don’t angry-vote, and make it come true.