The acres of print given to Brian Cowen's recent troubles show the so-called fourth estate really has given up on defending democracy, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
‘YOU SHOULD know that our leaders are big belly people, and they care about themselves more than anyone else.” So says Osman Shenwari, the mayor of a village in the Spinghar district of the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan. Yes, we do have rather a lot in common.
In Afghanistan there are varying estimates of exactly how much a vote is worth. Some estimates say a vote can be bought for $1, but the national average seems about $5. In the good times Irish votes could be said to have been bought with roads, of all things.
Or with a strategically placed hospital in the right constituency. A large institute of third-level education worked nicely, too. It is all to do with securing the territory.
This practice, which we all know has gone on for generations, is a tiny bit more damaging to democracy than a Taoiseach who comes on the radio sounding the worse for wear.
But it is a great deal less fun to talk about than the other mesmerising sentence uttered last week, in which the Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, said that it was widely known that the Taoiseach suffered from congestion. It was a fantastic laugh though.
Our democracy is over, probably. The Irish electorate left the marital home quite a while ago; but they left the media behind them to keep the Irish politicians company.
Because the Irish electorate feels sorry for Irish politicians – we gaze on politicians of all parties, and their little conferences, with a sort of watery sadness. That is why we threw a couple of things into a suitcase and ran for our lives. I think it was only last week that the Irish politicians realised that the electorate had left a long time ago.
The Irish politicians woke up with the Irish media, and the two of them were alone in the house.
The Irish politicians and the Irish media are still in love; they fancy each other, they need each other, they have an awful lot in common – and not just the fact that neither is at their best before 10 in the morning.
The Irish politicians and the Irish media wouldn’t do anything to hurt each other. It has always been obvious that, in fact, they were made for each other. The Irish electorate just got between them. That was a frustrating experience for all three parties involved. Now that the electorate has left home, the Irish politicians and the Irish media can stare into each other’s eyes undisturbed, forever.
In Afghanistan democracy is still a life or death struggle. Why do they want it so much? At the time of writing the Afghanistan election has left at least 10 people dead, and the number of votes cast – about 3.6 million – is down by about one million on the corrupt presidential election of 2009. There has been widespread intimidation.
The Taliban threatened to cut off not only any finger marked by the indelible ink that shows that you have voted, but your nose and ears as well. The campaign workers of one female candidate have been murdered. There were bombs placed in polling stations.
But if being a voter in Afghanistan is risky, then being an electoral candidate is rather popular. There were 2,500 candidates for 249 seats. This a country where half the population lives on less than a dollar per day. And the Taliban will pay a man $10 per day to work for them. By contrast, the electoral candidates who make it in to the final 249 will be earning a salary of $2,200 per month – and that’s before they exploit their enhanced potential for backhanders and bribes. So it is well worth investing in your campaign for political office.
By the way, Osman Shenwari, who talked about the big bellies of Afghanistan’s leaders, is no teenage cynic. He is a man of 60 and he wants to vote. Shenwari told the New York Times of one candidate who bought 10,000 voting cards at $11 per card. An Afghani reporter working for the New York Times rang up candidates offering them cards for sale at a starting price of $18, and in one case at least he was, if not exactly enthusiastically received, invited to negotiate.
In one of the seemingly endless and dangerous ironies Afghan women must suffer, the voting cards of women are more valuable than those of men.
This is because the voting cards of women do not carry a photograph – for “cultural” reasons – and so are child’s play to transfer and steal. They do not even have to be forged, presumably, as thousands of voting cards were.
In some places Afghani women are not allowed by the men in their families to go to the polling station at all, and so the men in the family bring the women’s votes to the polling station – which is handy.
It is stories like these, and the stories of how women everywhere have had to struggle even harder than poor men for the right to vote, that will bring me to an Irish polling station in our next election, whenever that is. Amidst all our belly-aching the news from Afghanistan is shame-making, when we have so much to be grateful for, and have thrown so much of it away.