How a non-voter is in one of the most insulted cohort in Ireland

And nobody cancels the next election. If voting is all that important, you’d think failure to do it would cause severe problems, but it doesn’t.

Now, here’s the thing. I didn’t vote in the referendum. Either way. On either proposition. I just didn’t vote. I confess to this from a defensive crouch, having been brought up to believe that voting wasn’t even a virtue; it was an essential aspect of self-respect, like cleaning your teeth.

The first time I failed to vote in a general election was a bit like the first time I didn’t go to Mass on Sunday. I expected to be struck dead. Smote by God in the case of Mass, although you have to be a bit above yourself to think that God, with the entire universe and infinity to be working on, would have the time to smite one individual for skipping Mass.

It wasn’t that I believed myself to be that important to God. I just thought God had eyes in the back of his head and a big staff.

When I didn’t vote, I had the same feeling, that someone was going to find me out and smite me. I did a pretty good self-smote, in advance of that. How could I not vote, when so many thousands of people had given their lives so that I could express my freedom at the ballot box?

How could I not vote when that woman had flung herself under the hooves of kings’ horses in order to win me and other women the vote?

The problem is that gratitude to historic heroes is shaped a bit like the tail of a comet. The first few generations experiences it with great force and is greatly motivated by it, with diminishing returns as time goes on, until it reaches the point where reference to it is as useful as reminders of how good your aunt was to give you those lovely vests for your seventh birthday and give her a big kiss, now.

None of us has a real memory of what it was like not to have a vote, and that woman who threw herself under the hooves of the King’s horse needed help, not gratitude.

I do have some excuse, lest any Irish Examiner reader were motivated to come and smite me personally for failing in my civic duty. When I moved about five years ago, my vote failed to move with me.

It clearly thought the new address was a come-down. Very powerful, is my vote’s refusal to move in with me. At the last election, they had notices that if you brought identification and a utility bill, even if you didn’t have a voting card, you’d be grand.

I arrived at the polling station with a passport, driver’s license and an ESB bill. The man in charge knew me. The local Garda superintendent, who happened to be there, also knew me and offered to vouch for me, if that were necessary, although we were collectively sure it wouldn’t be. I ended up leaving the polling station without voting and ever since have been filling forms to get myself re-enfranchised.

The end result is twofold. Sorry, threefold. I’m not responsible for the retention of the Seanad. I’m not responsible, either, for the creation of the new Appeals Court. I am, however, sitting squarely in the middle of the most insulted, misunderstood cohort: The ones who didn’t vote.

As broadcasters tried to get excited about the voter “wallop” on Saturday, I heard us non-voters described, again and again, in the most insulting terms, by one commentator after another. They treated us with such contempt, we could sue if only they’d put a name to us. The least worst term they applied to us was “apathetic”.

The bloody nerve of them. If you’re working all the hours God sends in order to keep paying your mortgage and put food on the table, whether or not we have a second chamber in the Houses of the Oireachtas may not be that important to us. But that doesn’t make us apathetic. If I choose not to bet on horses, Paddy Power doesn’t describe me as apathetic. The same applies if I don’t buy a jacket in Zara or Topshop.

The non-voters outnumbered the people who voted on either side of each of the two propositions, but the voters earned all the analysis. Nobody ever goes and asks the people who don’t vote why they abstained. Although, now that I think of it, the stigma attaching to non-voters is such that most of them probably wouldn’t admit that they’d failed to cast their vote. Certainly, asked about their intentions in advance, most of the non-voters lied. According to the opinion polls, they lied.

But then, of course, the opinion polls, yet again, got it so wrong that newspapers should (but won’t) address their gross over-dependence on the unreliable impressionism dressed up as news those polls deliver.

The opinion polls get more sophisticated all the time. In more recent times, commentators have been able to state that the huge majority saying X must be taken seriously because that majority is made up of people who say they are definitely going to vote. That’s what happened, this time around, and media fell for it, hook, line, and stinker. Which made for something of a surprise on Saturday, when it emerged that — shock, horror — a lot of them hadn’t turned out to vote at all.

Now, these no-shows may not have been committed liars. Maybe they didn’t want to disqualify the strongly held opinions they’d just expressed to a poller by announcing that they were not going to actually vote.

Nobody analysed that aspect of the opinion polls.

Everybody accepted that these weren’t just opinionated eejits with the time to answer a rake of questions and drum up opinions. They were a much better class: they intended to vote. People who intend to vote are like people who resolve to eat less, read more and keep their tyres at the right pressure. Most of them believe their own stated good intentions at the time they express those intentions.

Most of them do not subsequently deliver. That’s life. For the opinion poll companies to take this aspiration seriously, however, is crazy and — one hopes — will not be repeated in future.

But the oddity is that, when opinion polls get it wrong, as they frequently do, we never reproach them for wandering from the truth. Our love affair with them goes on, uninterrupted. Nobody says they’re apathetic or failed to engage. Why do us non-voters have to take all the opprobrium?

I’m good and sick of people hitting me with failing on my duty to democracy. It’s like being beaten with a loofah; it doesn’t do much damage, but it gets tedious after a while.

The reality is that not voting has no dire consequences. Nobody dies. Nobody goes to jail. Nobody gets fined. And nobody cancels the next election. They keep blithely on. If voting is all that important, you’d think failure to do it would cause severe problems, but it doesn’t.

It’s the one civic sin that has no bad outcome whatever. Remember, it was people who virtuously voted who gave us the governments which were in power during the economic meltdown...