With elections to
the local Council coming up on the 11th June, I thought it was
timely to look back at some past elections and see what previous candidates had
to offer. The 1960 elections were held
in June, the same month as I sat my Leaving Certificate examination in the
local Christian Brothers Secondary School.
Voting in those days was confined to those over 21 years of age, so my relative youthfulness probably
justified my then lack of interest in the 1960 elections. However, amongst the bits and pieces which
make up the clutter in my study, I have a one page stencilled letter which the supporters of one major political party
pushed through the letterbox of every house in the town. The eight point programme, perhaps better described
as election promises, makes interesting reading. Excluding the non specific
commitments such as “promising to work in the best interests of all the people
without regard to party membership”, one is left with a mish mash of promises
which were designed to touch the hearts of the electorate of 44 years ago and
by so doing garnish their votes on election day.
The electorate of
1960 were presumably stirred by the party’s commitment to the provision of
playing parks for Athy West Urban and the provision of a swimming pool, a
public library and a new Fire Brigade Station for the town. Achieving three out of the four even after 44
years is not too bad but whatever happened the party candidates plans to
initiate schemes for public walks, boating and fishing “and attracting tourists to Athy”. Little has been
achieved on any of these fronts in the intervening years, but perhaps these
promises can be taken out and polished up again for the forthcoming
election.
At a time when new
house building projects in the town are today measured in terms of hundred’s of
houses, how strange to see the remaining specific election promise of the 1960
election manifesto referring to the development of a site for private housing
on the Carlow Road. This was a major
housing initiative 44 years ago which gave us Chanterlands with its 20 or so
houses.
Local elections
always throw up an interesting lot of independent candidates whose enthusiasm
for the life of a local politician is not always matched by an understanding of
what the job entails. One such candidate
in the 1979 election based his election manifesto on the desire to retain car
tax within this area to be used for building local roads with any surplus
monies devoted to the building of houses.
The candidate clearly thought he was bidding for the Dail rather than
the local Town Council and the voters probably felt he had lost the plot as
they failed to give him sufficient support to get elected.
No such
misconceptions surrounded an independent candidate in the 1985 election who
identified the pressing local issues of the time as lack of Council housing,
lack of recreational areas and the abolition of charges for certain services
provided by the Council. The negative
emphasis in that candidates manifesto was copper fastened with his declared
opposition to the building of “luxurious municipal offices”. He too fell by the wayside unable to muster
sufficient support to stop the building of the “Taj Mahal” which now adorns
Rathstewart.
My favourite
Independent candidate however, is the one who in the lead up to the 1979 local
election promised, if elected, not to do what he claimed the Town Councillors spent their time doing ----
“talking nonsense”. He ventured the
belief that some of the Town Councillors “didn’t seem to have enough
intelligence to know how to go about doing anything”. His parting shot to one outgoing member of
the Town Council who was not seeking re-election was decidedly unkind “after
taking up valuable space in the Council Chamber for the past 34 years, it was
welcome news to many that he was standing down”. The appeal of this candidate strangely struck
a chord with the electorate and he was elected.
Not so lucky (or
maybe he was) was another Independent candidate who amongst his election
promises expressed himself “opposed to pig units in urban areas”. I still
cannot see the relevance of this in the context of an election to Athy Town
Council and obviously the electorate were similarly puzzled as the candidate’s
campaign lead nowhere.
Another hopeful
independent candidate who stood for election ten years ago paraphrasing
President Kennedy’s famous presidential acceptance speech, urged the Athy
electors to “think not what Athy can do for you, but what you can do for Athy”. The electorate probably did not give
sufficient thought to what was asked of them, for they promptly turned around
and elected some of the other candidates.
Promises,
especially election promises are almost always looked upon as likely to be as
dependable as perished elastic. We take
the commitments, the promises and the eagerly proffered undertakings with the
ingratitude of a man who has seen it all before while still expecting the
candidates to polish our egos and our sense of self importance. How else could we ever justify the electoral
circus which travels from door to door every few years during local election
campaigns..
I finish with the
claims of a another candidate who wrote rather scathingly of the body to which
he sought to be elected. “If one was to
sit down and assess the track record of the outgoing Council, to be kind, one
could only say its performance over the past five years was mediocre at
best. Viewing the achievements or lack
of them in that time, the evidence would give very little hint of any
intelligent life form having been extant in the Town Council during its last
tenure of office”. That clearly was a
brave candidate who surprisingly survived the election campaign and got himself
elected to the Council, where I’m told he felt very much at home.
Independents and
party candidates will be calling to our doorsteps over the next few weeks. Here’s hoping that they enjoy the experience
as much as we the electorate will.
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