Despite the bleating of vested interests, the Government's ban on opinion-polling in the week before an election ought to be welcomed by anyone with a genuine interest in the health of democracy. We should not be distracted by the arguments of those for whom opinion-polling is a source of revenue and power.
Irrespective of its motivation or timing, there are many good arguments in defence of this much-delayed decision, none of which have been given an outing this past week in newspapers which lay claim to being conduits of democratic discourse in this society. Once again, we have been given cause for disquiet about the inability of supposedly objective media to present arguments which are antithetical to their own interests.
The most obvious case against opinion polls relates to the pernicious influence on modern elections of the bandwagon effect, not the least of which may be the increasing failure of many people to vote. Decreasing turnouts indicate that the dangers of wall-to-wall polls in advance of elections may be greater than previously believed. Polls destroy the magical and sacred elements of elections by accentuating the relative pointlessness of a single vote.
Why bother voting if you already "know" the result?
THE pollsters and media organisations for whom they do their voodoo argue that opinion polls do not seek to predict the results of elections, but rather provide a "snapshot" of the public mood at the time of the poll.
There is a certain semantic truth in this, but if we take it literally we may be moved to wonder why they bother conducting opinion polls at all. It is odd that, whereas those with a strong vested interest in opinion-polling say that polls do not measure voting intentions, they are always quick to crow when their own polls appear to have accurately divined the public mood.
Of course, it is true that polls do not forecast the result of an election, but neither do they seek to ascertain from voters their views of the weather or the price of pigs. Polls are an attempt to discover how people are thinking of voting. There would be no point otherwise.
An even more fatuous argument is the notion put forward by the National Newspapers of Ireland that there is "a fundamental democratic right" to conduct and publish opinion polls. Opinion-polling is not a democratic phenomenon, but a cybernetic procedure which at best seeks to ape democracy.
The people surveyed in opinion polls are not voters in anything other than the most abstract of senses. Rather they are anonymous cyphers selected on the basis of probability theory who, for all we know, may never vote. The relationship between opinion-polling and true democracy is like that between cogging and the Leaving Cert.
There are many plausible arguments in favour of an outright ban on opinion polls, rather than just those conducted in close proximity to elections. Not the least is that they give power to media controllers and operators which is anything but fundamentally democratic, ensuring that a small number of relatively anonymous and highly motivated individuals have acquired an invisible political weapon to use as they please.
Polls are also in part responsible for the fact that much of our political journalism is increasingly divorced from the concerns of real voters, as evidenced by the fact that virtually the entire political analysis sector was caught offside by the result of the recent Nice Treaty referendum. If journalists had less access to polls, they might be more inclined to go out and ask real people what they think or desire.
THE argument made in this newspaper last week by Mr Jack Jones of MRBI that "if the public are to be deprived of the opinions of other electors, they will be left with nothing other than the doorstep inducements and baseless claims of the politicians themselves" is risible.
Does Mr Jones imagine that the electorate are now entirely dependent on media sources for information about "the opinions of other voters"? We had democracy long before we had opinion polls, and voters had no difficulty discovering or exchanging opinions.
Those who prate on about democracy and its freedoms frequently seem to lack even the most basic grasp of what democracy is. The reason we have elections, polling booths and a system whereby individual voters in conditions of secrecy place marks in pencil on pieces of paper before dropping them into tin boxes is not a matter of observing an archaic ritual: it relates to the fundamental nature of the democratic process.
Opinion polls are something different, being about chasing the quark, defined as an artificially-obtained digest of public opinion on a given subject at a frozen moment. The quark is a fetish to which modern politics has become addicted, to the detriment of all citizens.
As for the possibility that the restriction on polls might be unconstitutional: the relevant Constitutional provision (Article 40.6.1) protects "the right of citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions", and it would be a dark day for Irish democracy if an anonymous unit of a quota-controlled sample were to be recognised as a citizen.