Does my bum look big in this?

The #GE16 button has now well and truly been pushed and as we now countdown the days to polling day, 26^th February, we have already seen our streetscape change and alter with the plethora of election posters proliferating every lamppost and telegraph pole across the City and County.

Despite the best efforts of storm Imogen to blow these posters from the poles and posts, over the last week, most have managed to cling on due to the wonders of the modern day cable tie, which obviously has amazing tensile strength.

Having observed the many posters and leaflets, that have started filling up my letter box, I started to consider if the candidates “on offer/for sale” actually fit the party they are supporting and standing for.

For example you will know what I am implying when you see a picture of a friend or family member with their pet and you start to see similarities in looks and there are many examples of people posting pictures on social media and they look exactly like their pet!

It is uncanny that some people and their pets are a perfect match and I started to wonder if this was the case with candidates and their political parties.

Nickel mining.

This got me thinking if our #GE16 election candidates actually mirror their party and vice versa, basically do they do exactly what it says on the tin?

For example, if we have a candidate who is promoting an eco-friendly all things green ethos, does said candidate travel around the City and County, electioneering, on a bicycle or perhaps they might have one of those Nissan Leaf cars that is promoted as being Polar Bear and Penguin friendly. But in reality the energy and technologies needed to actually produce the car in the first place are in fact far from eco-friendly. I would find it hard to give such a candidate a vote if in fact they did not practice what they are preaching and could be seen driving around in V8 petrol Range Rover.

I suppose that we all need to listen to what our candidates are advocating and decipher whether or not they are actually practising their pulpit ramblings and electioneering husting promises.

Those candidates on the right that are promoting a business agenda, job creation and a commercial recovery under their party manifesto, which in all honesty is a book of pipedreams and fairytales, do they have any track record in creating, developing and nurturing a business?

Unless you have been in the extremely stressful position where you have to actually generate €10 in sales to make €1 to spend you will have absolutely no idea just how hard it is to succeed or fail in business. If your role in life and specifically your salary is not dependent on actually making your own money to live off then how can you possibly be in a space that relates to a business specific mantra.

Alternatively, those candidates on the left hand side of the centre line, who are championing Citizen Smith’s “power to the people” politics, are certainty not in the same space as many of the electorate they are proposing to support. After all how can you possibly be in that space when your Dáil salary will be circa €87,000 and average annual expenses available could be as much as €34,000 (net) and then there are other allowances on top of this to add to the gravy train.

Who bought one of these?

It is all very well that these candidates are talking about cutting this and cutting that but I do not see many of these people offering to accept the average industrial wage or in fact a living wage! And I do not know how many of us also get paid to travel to and from work, so why are such large and excessive expenses needed as well?

So to come back to “does my bum look big in this”? I do think that we have to look at what is on offer and ask ourselves if any of the candidates essentially match the politics being championed. 

If you have to question this then maybe you will have to look elsewhere.

Is the excitement building?

The Waterford media was awash last week with various General Election candidates finally launching their campaigns, media profiles in our excellent local newspapers and of course the promise of some robust debating in a series of US styled pre-election public, or invitation only, debates.

Of course we will never really know what we are getting with the new untested candidates and all we can hope for is that their rhetoric will deliver in the Ronseal way – “It does exactly what it says on the tin.”

But I am not sure if these new candidates will ever get the chance to deliver on their promises as they will have an enormous, almost gargantuan, task of uprooting the existing established sitting TD’s.

It would appear that with the exception of maybe one TD change the people of Waterford may well have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. After all we are seeing, albeit exceedingly small, green shoots of recovery across the South East and this in turn can only benefit Waterford. 

When push comes to shove and you have a pencil in your hand, with the ballot paper in front of you, are you really going to vote for a political sea change that could in all likelihood make the hard earned Euro in your pocket worth less with the reckless tick of a ballot paper box?

Off and running.

I would hazard a guess that people will vote for some form of stability and a better the devil you know attitude. It may well materialise that we do not see wholesale changes in the political map and we will end up with many of the same faces returning to Dublin. Real political change takes an awful lot longer than the full term of a Government and new political parties take even longer to establish and gain suitable foundations to build an organisation that can challenge the norm.

Our “Frontier Ministers” have been recently waxing lyrically about Waterford’s strength as part of a growing SE economy and being at the very heart of a multi-campus “Technological University”, which now appears to be back on the radar just in time for GE16. I have no doubt that we will continue to hear about how working together is a sound economic plan for Waterford and the SE but in reality we are still very much a fractured region with very little in the way of a one direction plan.

Yes, working collectively as region is the only way forward but the half hearted efforts to date have seen the erosion of our hospital services, a nibbling away at our third level institution, boundary arguments that could have filled the plot of a wild west cowboy movie and the general lack of urgency on a gateway status have all hindered the delivery of a meaningful recovery across the SE.

In last week’s column I stated some statistics around the Gross Added Value (GAV) of jobs in the SE and the GAV figure is extraordinarily low and this must surely be of concern to all the registered voters in Waterford and across the whole of the SE.

If we cannot attract significant high end investment to Waterford at this moment in time when, as we are continually being told, we are an exceptional region for investment, then what will happen if we allow the continued erosion of our third level education establishment, the continued reduction in our hospital services and the public bickering on boundary issues.

We could and will continue to be a PR nightmare if these types of issues are not fixed with a cohesive and sustainable plan.

So, should we be excited about the upcoming GE16? Yes we should and we must do our bit to ask the hard questions and engage with the Politics, because that is just what we are not expected to do.

I guarantee that a few tough questions on the doorstep will either make or break any canvasser and it will probably be a surprise that you asked in the first place. Try it!