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.

If you think about the numbers involved, that’s like we suddenly decided all of the women in Ireland — or, for that matter, all the men in Ireland — weren’t worth paying attention to.

Someone once remarked that it’s a miracle anybody gets cured by any health system, since medical research is 99% devoted to the sick, not to the well. Every doctor sets out to make sick people well, but the bulk of the research available to them isn’t based on the folks who have the wellness thing sussed, and who just might have something to offer as a result. It’s as if we studied ghost estates to learn about good building.

In the same way, when people go silent at election times, we don’t get curious about it. This is very odd, when you consider the amount of commentator attention devoted to “don’t knows” when an opinion poll is published. The headlines focus on who’s up and who’s down, but the in-depth analysis moves past the big, simple numbers, with commentators rightly balancing their interpretation of poll results with caveats about the relative numbers of people within each poll who claim not to know what they’d do if there were an election, or who they regard as a good political leader. The block of “don’t knows” may be tiny compared to the people who plump for one side or one leader over another in such an interrogation of public opinion, but the block is, nonetheless, considered to be important.

Yet in an election which provokes poor turnout, the block is not considered to be important. It is devalued as representative of a bunch of weather-fearful irrational, bitter-and-twisted, couch potatoes. Nobody ever goes out and does either quantitative or qualitative research to get beyond that unsupported and probably unsupportable judgment. Pity. Because the people who stayed at home in the recent by-election could probably tell a tale which would be useful to all political parties, particularly the Labour Party.

It is unrealistic, for starters, to assume that more than half the Meath East electorate stayed at home in order to stick their fingers in Labour’s eyes. That didn’t happen. Some of them stayed at home because of the weather, but that probably affected all parties more or less equally. Some of them stayed at home for much more sensible political reasons than they’re given credit for.

Ireland currently has a government with a massive, overwhelming majority. The Meath East voter knew damn well that no matter how they voted, they were going to make no significant difference to that at all. So they made a commonsense, if passive, statement. And not necessarily a negative statement. Silence is usually interpreted as indicative of consent, and many of those who voted may believe that, while they hate what is happening to them as a result of the “tough decisions” politicians unwisely congratulate themselves on making, the direction set by those decisions is acceptable. Since their vote carried no possibility of changing that direction, they sensibly decided not to cast it. Canvassers from more than one party reported as far back as 10 days prior to polling day, that they were encountering something they hadn’t registered in previous elections. They were meeting people who were reasonably satisfied with the Government, but who clearly were not going to vote. And they were meeting people who were deeply, passionately dissatisfied with the Government, but could see no great merit in making the effort to express it other than to the politicians who knocked on their door. It was not, in that sense, a failure of democracy, but a sophisticated use of the democratic process.

The garda who engaged with the Taoiseach was the perfect example. Because he had that severely inflated look of one of those rubbery figures garages put on the flat roof of their establishment, restrained by guy ropes, that guard was a visual Godsend. He was Joe the Plumber for this by-election. He said his spake, the Taoiseach took him on, the two of them had a debate which was reported in all media and came to a reasonably civil parting. He may or may not have voted thereafter, but whether he did or he didn’t, he had made his point, and made the point thousands of other people would have wanted to make. One single vote for any candidate could not have done as much.

Pat Rabbitte sadly observed, apropos the poor result for Labour, that macroeconomics butter no parsnips. The implication being that the Labour campaign was rooted in macroeconomics. This is to miss a wider point. The first aspect of that point is that it wasn’t macroeconomics that felled Labour. What felled Labour was a number of factors, not least of which is that Government parties, especially Government parties setting out to rescue a bad situation, tend to fall in love with their own Programme for Government, which in turn leads them to focus on the past and the present. Here’s the shocking situation That Lot handed to us, and here’s what we’ve had to do. Opposition parties and particularly Independents always fight for the future, which is much more appealing to voters — hence the good showing of Ben Gilroy.

Gilroy had no chance whatever of creating a new politics as a result of the by-election. That didn’t matter to the people who braved the weather to vote for him. What mattered to them was the future he painted. The Labour Party needs to paint a picture of the future that captures the imagination of their traditional voters. (As must Fine Gael. The Taoiseach’s “best little country in which to do business” is like one of those tiny canapés you get in a supermarket: It gives you the taste of what the totality might be, but a meal it ain’t.)

Labour must be wary of believing that all the non-voters are uniformly hostile the party and to its policies. In a general election, for example, issues such as gay marriage may be serious and immediate matters of concern to voters, despite the fact that those issues were of minimal relevance in the by-election.

It would help them move beyond the ritual responses of leader-condemnation if they concentrated on the people who did not vote in this by-election but who are likely to vote in a local or general election. The dogs that didn’t bark…