Election posters the least of our worries

There were sparks in Westport last week when posters for certain election candidates appeared around the outskirts of the town. They didn’t last long on those poles for they violated an old custom: you don’t election poster in Westport, however well designed those posters might be. A town famous for the look and smell of fresh paint doesn’t have that sort of thing. Those who have long detected some Westport exceptionalism would have smiled. Many other towns might be glad of the splash of colour election posters bring.

Or maybe not. All around you hear more and more grumbles about them. More and more villages and streets and areas try and prevent posters being put up.

Whether they ever made any real difference to a result has never been definitively answered, though all have theories and views. A poster is of course intended to be noticeable. It is also, of course, noticeable that it is usually those who are already elected and well known who are most supportive of postering bans.

People are not just sick of posters though. On more and more post boxes, more and more people equate election literature with junk mail. We don’t want that rubbish is the message. More concerningly, parties and politicians are reporting serious grief when they knock on doors, or even when walking down the street.

How things have changed, and so quickly. I remember a time when there were only three big concerns when canvassing, and none of them was vicious abuse. One, that you would knock on a door during a Champions League match. That would lose you a vote as quick as win you one. Two, that a supporter of one of the other candidates would keep your candidate talking on the door, the better to slow down the canvass. And three, that if the door was not opened, a dog would bite your finger when leaving the leaflet in the letter box. That actually happened, though not to me.

When it came to putting up posters, one big concern was whether the cable ties holding them to the pole would survive the wind. But the real nightmare was that, when all your posters were proudly in place, you would discover that the NAME OF THE CANDIDATE was not legible from road level.

Those experiences arose in simpler, and definitely different, times. That was the world before the economic crash of 2008-11. Something fundamental has changed since then. I remember first detecting it in 2010 after coming back to Ireland after a spell in London. Prior to that, my sense was that most people thought that politicians had a touch of the rogue about them, but when they said it, they said it with half a smile. Indeed, many of those who thought politicians were rogues meant it, quite sincerely, as a compliment.

By 2010, after the experiences of the economic crash, they were beginning to say the same words, but in anger. Despite the general improvement in the wider economy since then, the tone has not improved – in fact, it has gone the other way. In 2024, more and more are saying things like that about politicians, and much more, and in fury. The decibel levels are rising on that all the time.

Prior to the crash, people would distinguish between the general class of people who were politicians, and their own individual politician. They would say ‘ah they are all bad, but such and such I know isn’t so bad.’ Experience of the person taught them something about the reality of the role. It softened the cough.

That too has more or less disappeared, made worse perhaps by how depersonalised so much of human interaction and communication has become.

Once upon a time, people would have understood that politicians sometimes had to avoid telling you the absolute truth. Indeed, some had a sneaking admiration for the idea that they might have to bend the rules in order to get things done. In my youth, I can remember well the point of view – far from universal, but not uncommon – which said, ‘I don’t care how Charlie got rich: he might make us all rich!’ 

Much more common was the tendency to treat anything a politician did, such as helping you get the medical card to which you were entitled, as a slightly shady magician’s trick. There was a sort of shared pleasure in the illusion that a stroke had been pulled.

The irony is that there were almost certainly more overtly corrupt practices in the past than there are now, but it’s today that people think politicians lie all the time and are always up to something crooked, and never in order to do any good. Alongside that, respect for the skills of the politician, for the tools of the trade, has collapsed if not entirely disappeared. People increasingly do not want to know why a politician would want to avoid stating their position early, or appreciate how they handle a situation where people are telling them a story in order to extract something for the teller.

Fewer and fewer appreciate that you cannot magic away problems, and there is very little patience anymore for any talk of a process to address a grievance. It is ‘now, now, now’, and if a politician doesn’t say yes, or worse still – tries to hold their counsel – it is the hell with you.

All you have to do is open your ears and you can hear this day in and day out. So it came as no surprise to me that recent research by the Electoral Commission has found that almost 69% of voters in an opinion poll they commissioned agreed that “most people who run for office are generally interested in their own importance, power and the perks of office". Some 59% agreed that “most politicians only care about the interests of the rich and powerful". 

Is it any wonder then that people don’t like posters, and don’t want to see them? They don’t want to see candidates who they assume are trying to look great in pursuit of "their own importance, power and perks of office". So those posters are doing the opposite of what they meant to do. People look up now and they throw their eyes to heaven, often in fury. Maybe that means that the custom in Westport should spread and that it would be good for the politicians if it did. I’m not sure that’s what I draw from all this though. It’s not a good time for politics, politicians or democracy. With the way things are going, the issue is increasingly not whether we have election posters, but who on earth would want to put their face on one.