It's about a month since I was canvassed to elect Daniel Pender to the local county council. Local elections are really local. Even county Carlow which is a micro civil polity [90,000 hectares; 62,000 ppl] is divvied up into 3 LEAs Local Election Areas. We are assigned to the southernmost LEA, comprised of the scut-end of the county: wedged between the Blackstairs and the River Barrow. Of course, my #1 went to Willie Quinn who lives between us and the nearest post office. But I did give Dan Pender a number. You're meant to continue your choices until you really have absolutely no preference among the remaining candidates.There were only 8 candidates for 5 seats at the county council table. Having excluded the patently deranged, the fixers and racists, it should be a shoo-in for any reasonably honest, reasonably personable, fairly photogenic, applicant for the job. Who takes the photos on the promotional literature? Who signs off on the choice??
Well, the votes are counted and the results are shown here [R]. And who gets elected on the first count? . . . with a chunky surplus, but The Fixer, who arranged-to-be-delivered 100 tonnes of roadstone back in Feb 2022. Call me peculiar, but I'm not going to vote for people who bend the system in the interests of patronage. That kind of grift inevitably preferences those who have connexions and excludes those who really need a leg up. Willie sailed in on the second count. The person who's ragin' this weekend is the monumental incumbent Arthur McDonald FF. The people have voted for a younger, fresher, fitter version of Fianna Fáil - Go Dan Pender! The next Taoiseach but four.
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