'Yes, we have no Jeeps!'

There was a moment of stunned silence at a planning meeting of the ‘Diarmuid O’ Flynn for MEP, Ireland South’ campaign group the other week. In fact, calling ourselves a campaign group might be misleading – Diarmuid himself prefers to call us the ‘kitchen cabinet’. We are a coalition of the willing doing everything humanly possible without the lavish campaign funds of the main political parties to see this man of true integrity and founder of the determined ‘Ballyhea Says No to the Bondholer Bailout’ campaign elected to represent us in Europe.

The silence fell when someone reported that one of the main party candidates in Ireland South had no fewer than seven specially painted up Jeeps with his grinning visage on their sides, travelling around the electoral area. Another of his collegues in the area was reported to have a fleet of similarly painted up vans. With lamp posts, walls and roundabouts all over the region festooned in posters of themselves, multiple leaflet drops into our homes and a myriad invitations from commercial and other vested interests to public and private speaking engagements - there will be no possibility of escape from these people for the next 4 weeks. One might also question the wisdom of riding about the region in these custom liveried vehicles and campaign bus accompnaied by a throng of footsoldiers in specially designed t-shirts and jackets.  How much more disconnected from our present reality could this behaviour be? We get it folks - in recession-battered Ireland money is still no object for some of you! 

And all of this on top of the morn-til-dusk, largely uncritical attention they will get from the local and national media compared to candidates like Diarmuid O’Flynn.  By voting day (May 23rd), you’d nearly send them to Europe so as not to have to see or hear from them again.

Anyway, to get back to the kitchen cabinet: David didn’t slay Goliath by donning the same kind of heavy armour, trying to swing the same kind of heavy sword. We won’t have a fleet of expensive jeeps but we do have car stickers - available by the way to anyone who would ‘wear’ one on their own vehicle. We will also have a couple of reasonably priced campaign-trailers which we will tow from town to town when we get on the campaign trail on May 5th; and we have flyers and leaflets we’ll be distributing in as focused a way as possible (again, available for anyone who wants to volunteer to help anywhere in the constituency).

Most of all, we have the website, www.diarmuidoflynn.com, the cornerstone of the campaign, the one-stop shop where anyone who wants to know anything about Diarmuid can inform themselves – his roots, the Ballyhea campaign, his manifesto, political philosophy, and his endorsements from across the political spectrum and across all of Irish society. And if you want to offer your own endorsement, or want to help with the campaign either on the ground or financially (small donations preferred), you can do that also.

National media interest so far for any candidate who is not a member of one of the main political parties is disappointing. Diarmuid O’Flynn and other independents are still disproportionately dependent on word of mouth compared to the others. Which brings me to the point of this piece. Last week's Sunday Times and other polls show that voters are turning to independents because they are free to pursue the policies on which they are elected without being brow-beaten to abandon them by party apparatchiks once the election is over.

Should success in an election depend at all on how much money a candidate can spend? Or is it supposed to be about which candidate is making the best case for the country? Shouldn’t our media be making a concerted effort to give an airing to every perspective?

An RTE Drivetime election special in a hotel in Kilkenny on Wednesday the 23rd of April was illustrative. A panel of six of the eleven Ireland South candidates had been convened for a discussion chaired by presenter Mary Wilson. For most of the fracas that followed, the Fine Gael and Labour candidates were allowed repeatedly to interrupt and talk over the others who had politely allowed them to speak when it had been their actual turn. The result was an incomprehensible cacophony. At a time of severe ‘austerity’ (read theft of our future), to hear big party representatives behaving like this is not just upsetting, it is insulting.

Now, this business of shouting other people down during broadcasts is a well worn bully-boy/girl tactic of media-trained politicos. So long as the opposition don’t get to speak, they can’t expose the weakness of the argument. The listening public and its interest in what each of the candidates have to say is of no concern. And broadcasters try to persuade us that this makes for interesting ‘debate’.

By failing to mediate these discussions properly the media are turning the listening public away in droves from engagement with democracy. This suits the agenda of our political elite very well. Voter apathy keeps them in power. So please don’t do that, dear voter. Don’t be apathetic - vote on May 23rd and demonstrate your rejection of the strangled, party-political establishment that treats you with this sort of contempt. Better than that, vote positively for people who are building an independent alternative.

Follow @oflynnformep (official Diarmuid O'Flynn campaign twitter account) and @Ballyhea14

Want to support the campaign? Register here:  http://www.diarmuidoflynn.com/p/contact.html

Email: DiarmuidOFlynnForMEP@gmail.com