If constituencies could sue for libel, Dublin South Central this week would have a great case. Any reasonable bystander, listening to and reading the commentators on the by-election, would come to the conclusion that the majority of potential voters in the area are both comatose and indifferent, not to mention droopy.
The word "apathetic" has been used so frequently to describe the people living in South Central that it drove me to my PC's thesaurus for synonyms, to double-check the level of insult aimed at those who didn't vote in the area. Apathy, my computer told me, means lack of interest and lack of concern. It means laziness, indifference, boredom and ennui. It even, it offered, means droopiness.
An indifferent, droopy lot. That's the astonishing judgment being made against the non-voters of Dublin South Central - by commentators who have the evidence to the contrary available to them, if they but chose to look at it. Or listen to it: in one RTE radio programme, a number of non-voters in the area told the reporter their reasons for not voting.
One of them was a working mother of two young children. She would have to pay a child-minder to get out at night to vote, she said, her tone indicating that, much as she might value the franchise, she wasn't prepared to spend money on exercising it.
An older woman said she hadn't received any voting cards. She was under the misapprehension that without a voting card you couldn't vote. A third non-voter had recently turned 18. She didn't know anything about the candidates, she told the reporter, and she was certainly not going to vote for people about whom she knew nothing.
Even the most incoherent of the vox pop interviews divulged highly significant information which has been ignored by the vast bulk of the experts writing and talking about the low turn-out. The less coherent interviewees said nothing much, but they said it defensively. They knew that the interviewer was reproaching them - the tone in which the question was asked made that clear. They could pick up the implication that they should have voted, and so there was genuine puzzlement in their "Why should I?" responses. Were they missing something? Did the interviewer know something they didn't know?
The reality is that most of the interviewers who were out pursuing non-voters in Dublin South Central were gently browbeating them with a virtuous assumption: the franchise is important, you are wicked if you don't exercise it. The interviewers were missing the point.
Voters are not wicked if they fail to cast their vote. They are simply failing to cast their vote because the connection between that vote and their real life is unclear to them. And the connection between casting your vote and thereby influencing the factors that control your life is missing, presumed dead, in many areas of Ireland and for huge numbers of people under 40. But the missing connection isn't the fault of the non-voters. That vital connection has gone missing for a number of reasons. One of those - shared by the Republic with the majority of western democracies - is a factor of time. The highest turn-outs in elections always happen when a state becomes a democracy for the first time - witness the queues to vote in South African and Cambodian elections in recent times.
One of the reasons for this is that the voter can remember what it was like when he or she could not vote, and consequently has an acute awareness of the difference represented by the franchise. That awareness becomes less acute with every passing generation. As the awareness becomes less acute, so, too, does the impact of reminders.
So, some woman threw herself under the king's horse in order to get me the vote? Good for her. But I have a life, it's a pretty demanding life, and I see no benefit to me in going to the polling centre when I could be playing with the kids or unwinding after a tough day at work.
That is not apathy, that is good time-management - just as the decision, by one of the vox pop interviewees, not to vote because she didn't know anything about any of the candidates, is common sense.
If this young woman announced in a radio interview that she wouldn't buy a mini-disc recorder without knowing which brand gave best value, we would all say: "What a bright, educated consumer." What on earth gives us the right, when she says she won't vote for much the same reasons, to say: "What an apathetic, irresponsible droop"?
The other side of this mad equation is the suggestion that, because only a minority voted, Mary Upton may have got elected, but it wasn't really democracy. When this was put to Ruairi Quinn, perhaps an hour after the Labour Party victory, it (properly) aggravated him so much that this most precise of communicators became incoherent, colliding with the word "personation" like a man going the wrong way in a revolving door.
I was in the revolving door with Ruairi on this one.
The majority of the people who care about having someone represent them picked Mary Upton. The people who don't care about having someone represent them picked alternative expressions of their current priorities in life. The notion that more than half the voters were forced to stay away because of what's come out in the tribunals is so irrational as to beggar belief - yet this "explanation" has been posited again and again in the last two days.
EXAMINE that "explanation" for just one moment. Sleaze and scandal has been washing out of the various tribunals. But if we look at the party most affected by it - Fianna Fail - we see in Dublin South Central that the Fianna Fail candidate, Michael Mulcahy, topped the poll in first preferences on the first count, and ended up as second choice, with a drop of 4 percentage points on the General Election vote pattern. That is not grievously larger than the traditional vote-drop in a by-election.
With the exception of Michael Lowry, Fine Gael has not been greatly damaged by the tribunals, so if we believe the suggestion that the sleaze output of those tribunals had an impact, we would expect its candidate, Catherine Byrne, to have done unusually well. She didn't.
Neither apathy nor shock at scandal explain the no-shows. And by our too-ready, too simplistic explaining away of their absence, we are blinkering ourselves against learning what we must learn: that the connection between voting and any benefit to the voter has, for a majority of the electorate, evaporated.
Maire Geoghegan-Quinn can be contacted at mgeogheganquinn@irish-times.ie