If there's one thing this presidential election shows more than any other, it's the rock-solid common sense of the Irish public. Even the turnout shows that. It's too easy to decide that this particular contest failed to engage the imagination of the public and that therefore they stayed at home, which in turn is an indictment of the political process or the candidates or whoever you'd fancy indicting. An alternative explanation for the low turnout is that people knew the election was decided long before polling day, and so it wasn't worth it to fight the traffic (particularly in Dublin on Thursday) to get to their polling station to cast a vote they believed to be, not irrelevant but unnecessary.
There can be no doubt that the almost daily opinion-polling of the final weeks established in the public mind a sense of inevitability. Those who wanted Mary McAleese as President knew they didn't have to worry, or indeed vote. Those at the other end of the contest, who wanted Derek Nally as President, knew they couldn't achieve their objective, and that undoubtedly served as a disincentive. But neither of these judgments on the part of voters adds up to inertia or apathy. It just proves that common sense and good time management are more important to people in their daily lives than the exercise of their franchise, no matter how theoretically noble that may be.
The only people who could see in the opinion polls the possibility of using their votes to achieve something were the supporters of Dana Rosemary Scallon. They spotted, in the last week, that they could put the final stamp on her shift from joke candidate to moral victor. This they duly did.
There is certainly an issue about opinion polls and their role in the election process. Opinion polls are tending to replace journalism. Jack Jones's byline is as likely to be on a lead story the week of an election as is the name of the political editor of a newspaper. The old image of the probing reporter, notebook in hand, asking tough questions, is being replaced by the image of the market researcher, clipboard in hand, asking the voter: "What do you think yourself?"
Old-style journalists may not like the trend, but it's a lot more than a way to fill pages of a newspaper. In this election the opinion polls served as a valuable corrective.
Columnists and reporters reacted in print to each event throughout the campaign, whether it was a television debate or the notorious leaks. So, for example, the double-whammy of antiMcAleese leaks resulted in page after page of coverage, shot through with vividly hostile pieces by colour writers who couldn't stick the leading candidate and said so with great passion.
What the opinion polls showed - on this and other issues - was the great common sense of the general public.
Voters read the coverage, enjoyed some of it, perhaps agreed with some of it. They watched the TV programmes to see if what they were reading was borne out by how Mary McAleese performed, and found no direct link. They then made a sensible decision. That was based on the real questions voters were asking themselves. Questions like, "Which of these candidates is going to look best, sound best when representing me to visiting dignitaries?", "Which of these candidates is most composed, confident, unflurried?", "Which of these candidates has the intellectual capacity to respectably personify the nation?"
The opinion polls reflected what people were actually thinking, as opposed to what columnists (including me) might want them to think. They arguably served Dana best, indicating to all of us that the general public, starting with a high resistance factor, had given Rosemary Scallon a hearing and found there was more to her than the initial caricature. Another indication, this, of the commonsensical yet complex way people approached this election. They didn't just say: "I'm liberal and I won't vote for a right-wing Catholic like Rosemary Scallon." They said: "I'm liberal and I might just give a vote to this woman because she has a bit of a fight to her, a bit of humour to her."
In the process, they weighed up the suggestions that a vote for Dana or for Mary McAleese would lead to a "rolling back" of all that had been achieved in recent years in newly liberal Ireland. And they rightly found those suggestions wanting in any kind of real threat.
Liberals have always greatly overestimated the influence of Mary Robinson. Because what she said in public resonated with their own thinking, they assumed the rest of the world was halted in its tracks and changed in its practices by her utterances, whereas the world was unchanged in any real way by her presidency, and will be unchanged in any real way by that of her successor.
Having suggested that the opinion polls served as a corrective, I must nonetheless wonder to what extent they are replacing the real poll in people's minds. Questioning people who admitted to not voting, I've been struck by how many of them say: "What was the point? I couldn't affect the end result." Obviously, where opinion polls illustrate tight contests between candidates, voters may be actively motivated to vote one way or the other, but where an apparently unbridgeable gap is shown by the polls, the response may be a helpless shrug: why bother?
It's not an easy either/or decision. But that complexity figured throughout the campaign. Consider the dirty-tricks efforts. The consensus seems to be that dirty tricks, used against Mary McAleese, were counterproductive. Floating voters read the leaks and decided that the material did not do the damage to the candidate the leaker assumed it would do. Fianna Fail voters read the leaks and united, in the old family reflex, against attack from the outside.
On the other hand, the consensus, equally, seems to be that the dirty tricks against Adi Roche did do her damage. Just how much is not quantifiable, but there is a case for suggesting that the timing of the assault on her image by former co-workers was lethal, because it coincided with the phase of her campaign when she was effectively being introduced to voters who had only a vague notion of who she was or what she stood for.
The campaign was too drawn out, so we were bored long before the end of it. But it scotched a lot of nonsense, forced candidates to tighten up their use of the English language, exposed despicable dirty trickery, and reminded us all of the complex common sense with which the Irish voter approaches elections. Mary McAleese won decisively. The plain people of Ireland didn't do too badly, either.