It’s about time to take a look at what those non-voters want to say

It’s the dog that didn’t bark in the night that’s most interesting.

The voter who didn’t vote. More than half of those who could have expressed their view in the recent by-election didn’t stir their stumps and get themselves down to the polling station. They didn’t bark at all.

Yet we ignore them. Isn’t that an amazing thing? We never pay any attention to the ones who don’t vote, even when their numbers are as enormous as they were in Meath East. To hell with them, we implicitly say. Or we get openly pejorative about it and call it voter apathy. Or deploy the ever-handy cliché and interpret their silence as significant of their wish to deliver “a plague on all your houses”. Or, for the most part, we behave as if they didn’t exist.