Irish Examiner view: It's up to voters to keep the haters out

Election day is finally here

This is D-Day for hundreds of candidates hoping to be elected. File picture

After weeks of campaigning, on Friday the polls open all over Ireland for the European and local elections.

It would be a well-worn cliche to say this is D-Day for those hundreds of candidates hoping for success. Though there is a growing sense of unease with using such martial imagery in a non-military context, the cliche rings particularly hollow this week.

We have seen in recent days the 80th anniversary of the actual D-Day, when Allied forces landed along the beaches of Normandy to open the western front of resistance to the Nazis.

Even at this remove, that event retains a power to stir the blood, nations rallying together to confront a barbaric enemy guilty of terrible crimes against humanity. 

A film like Saving Private Ryan offers some sense of the chaos and the carnage, as well as the heroism, involved in the D-Day landings. The survivors’ numbers dwindle every year but the debt owed to them by succeeding generations remains immense.

It is worth taking a moment to glance at the horrifying ideology which drove those heroes’ enemies. WH Auden’s “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s gave rise to popular movements across Europe which depended on a mess of hateful notions cobbled together into a half-baked but lethal philosophy.

Common elements in those belief systems ranged from strident xenophobia to antipathy towards science and reason, an eagerness to isolate and blame minorities for society’s ills as well as hatred of freedom of expression — and a preference for mob rule and violent confrontation.

Does that sound familiar?

At the polls, readers will see candidates on their ballot papers who share many of the hateful beliefs mentioned above. People who are keen on misrepresentation and manipulation, on fostering hatred and repression.

The blandest rationale which can be offered is that, in any functioning democracy, a variety of electoral candidates must be expected and the government of the day can often expect a kicking. How well our democracy is functioning when polling stations must undergo Garda security checks is another matter, of course.

Perhaps D-Day is the appropriate term after all. Voters can make their own contribution towards democracy in the privacy of the polling booth.

Cork transport issues need resolving now

It’s a phenomenon reminiscent of the classic bus stop experience. You wait ages for a news story which illustrates the challenges facing public transport in Ireland, then two come along at once.

On Thursday, this newspaper revealed that the National Transport Authority (NTA) is to spend €16m on consultants over the next four years, seeking advice on a range of issues.

The NTA has already spent almost €2.5m on public consultation for its contentious €600m BusConnects Cork project, though “it could be early next year before the final designs for its network of 11 strategic transport corridors are ready for submission to An Bord Pleanála”.

We also learned, however, that Bus Éireann is planning a bus driver recruitment blitz in Cork City this month after what it termed “unforeseen driver shortages” caused a raft of service cancellations on several busy city routes across the bank holiday weekend.

Any significant revamp of a city transport system such as BusConnects needs wide-ranging consultation. Picture: Dan Linehan

Hundreds of passengers were left stranded at bus stops over the weekend when some scheduled city bus services were cancelled — the 24-hour high-frequency 220 service and the 203 were among the services affected.

One of these issues doesn’t cause the other: Bus Éireann is not short of drivers because the NTA is investing in consultation. Clearly, Bus Éireann can afford to hire the new drivers it needs, otherwise it would not be trying to recruit them.

Similarly, no one is advocating a significant revamp of a city transport system such as BusConnects Cork be carried out without wide-ranging consultation. It could be argued that in this context there can be no such thing as too much public consultation.

What these stories expose, however, is a dual timeline — a national organisation trying to strategise for the next 10 to 20 years, while commuters are facing serious operational issues in the here and now.

The immediacy of the latter problem makes it the priority: Whatever the issue is in Cork with drivers it needs to be resolved. Otherwise, commuters who give up on the bus service because of unreliability now may not return to it when BusConnects becomes a reality later.