Politics online: TDs still count on personal touch to engage with voters

Although the vast majority of TDs have embraced social media, a small cohort still believe knocking on doors and pressing palms is the way to secure a Dáil seat.

Labour’s Willie Penrose is one of the members of Leinster House who declares himself a “Luddite”.

“I am a traditionalist and, if the people want, they can telephone me or they can fax me or write to me and that’s good enough,” he said. “People send me emails but I don’t even know how to get them, but my secretary does.

“I’m a Luddite or whatever you would call me. I’m stuck in the past but I am quite happy. I think there is only a few like me left in the Dáil. I have no interest in that at all.”

The Longford-Westmeath TD said he was not aware that a Twitter account had been set up on his behalf.

Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin: Only recently joined Facebook after pressure from his children.

“I have no interest in Twitter; as a matter of fact the party probably put me on Twitter or something like that,” he said. “I have no interest in it, good, bad, or indifferent, I am not on Facebook, and I have no interest in anything like that.”

Asked whether social media could have a bearing on voting this time he said: “If that happens, I will lose and so be it, that’s the will of the people.

“I will be knocking on the doors and I won’t be bothering with Twitter or anything like that. I will be knocking on doors and meeting the people. Meeting people face-to-face and holding clinics, that’s the way to do it, the other is too impersonal.

“The instantaneous reactions and people want to show themselves off as great, be first out with the news, I think the Irish people are a bit more wary than that.”

Another sitting TD yet to adopt Twitter is Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, who said he only set up a Facebook account recently after coming under pressure from his children.

Willie Penrose: ‘I’m stuck in the past but I am quite happy.’

“I don’t do Twitter. I am on Facebook,” he said. “I am only relatively recently on Facebook. It was mostly my children pushing and saying that ‘Dad you should do this’. It was a long campaign that eventually wore me down from the kids, all five of them. I suppose in a way I am a bit of a technophobe.”

However, he agreed that social media does have a part to play in electioneering.

“It compliments what one would do in the traditional way in terms of meeting the people and interviews with broadcast media, I have no doubt that it is an advantage in reaching a new and younger audience. I am just a later convert to it,” he said.

“I will doing my best both in the traditional and indeed in the new-fangled way in terms of Facebook but will be me and the sum total of my engagement online.

“But I don’t intend to go on Twitter.”