Local elections Round up!

Less than 2 months to polling in the local elections, I’m out knocking doors already so what’s it all about? Well this is the first election that it is all about local issues. Five years ago, it was all about Phil Hogan, Alan Shatter and James Reilly and the disastrous decisions they made in office. Nowadays I reckon few voters can remember what they looked like let alone the chaos of the last local election.

Firstly, there’s 12 candidates in Wexford District. Fine Gael are running 3; John Hegarty, Ger Walsh and Angela Roche Reville. Fianna Fail has 2 standard bearers; Colin Murphy and Gary Laffan. Labour run 3; myself, George Lawlor and Maura Bell, Sinn Fein run Thomas Forde while Davy Hynes and Leonard Kelly will be the independent candidates. People Before Profit will run Tony Walsh.

Wexford Town and District will elect 7 councillors to represent a population of about 30,000. Most of the voters live in Wexford town inside the by pass. Castlebridge and Barntown are the 2 other major population centres in the ward.

So what are the issues? Mental Health services and local authority housing are both issues that some candidates are keen to highlight. There’s no doubting that both services in Wexford are not on a par with other counties. I’ve strong views on both. Let’s summarise them. Mental health provision and social housing rely on external funding from the state. The council will build houses if central government comes up with the cash. What are needed are the skill sets in County Hall to build.

Mental health is a diverse topic. As a parent and teacher I’d still think I’m learning something new everyday. That doesn’t give me an automatic in on how older people are affected. My experience has been that when a councillor no council avoided discussing issues on funding and service availability. But we recognised that it was a matter for the HSE or Tuasla  as the case may be. Wexford county council doesn’t deliver mental health services. A councillor may make the case for them and many candidates do that already.

So when it comes to the traditional topics that a council does, and does well, what is making Wexford voters think? Abolition of the borough council and the democratic deficit is the big issue on doors. The electorate know they have less councillors now than 5 years ago. Were it not for my colleague George Lawlor, Wexford town would be in a sorry state.

Since 2014, decisions affecting Wexford have been taken by councillors who by and large don’t live in the town and never represent the electorate there. Most Wexford town voters would be hard pushed to identify a rural based councillor from a photo or identify something the councillor has achieved for the town. That sounds harsh but it’s true. Again and again this comes up on the doorstep.

Clear blue water has opened up in the last 5 years between the local electorate and the council that takes decisions that affects it. The council often tends to focus on issues that have little bearing on the lives of town dwellers. The Wexford dividend that Brendan Howlin put in place as a minister is coming to an end. The business that were expected to open off the back of natural gas, improved road network are nowhere to be seen. Issues such as footpaths and potholes in rural parts of South Wexford dominate councillors time.

The electorate don’t expect a IFS to be built in town but they’d appreciate a vision of how things could be better for them and their children’s lives. For a few years, despite the last local elections giving us new councillors who promised a lot, little has changed. Setting out a new vision for Wexford is the task ahead of candidates in the next 8 weeks. Deciding which vision is best is the job of the electorate!

Not on our own when it comes to social isolation

Urbanisation is a growing trend in Irish society. Critical mass, planners tell us, is the key to delivering better services and access. So it might  surprise you to find out that in fact isolation levels in Co Wexford are highest in urban parts of the county.

This contradicts the narrative of the death of rural Ireland where post offices, garda stations and shops have all shut in recent years. What stands out in figures released by Wexford County Council is that social isolation is highest in Enniscorthy, and all 3 urban areas of Wexford.

Social isolation is the absence of social contact and can lead to loneliness. It can be caused by ageing, distance from loved ones, poor personal health, unemployment among other factors.  When you drill down it is easy to see why Wexford might have levels of isolation above the national average.

It has an older population, family structures branch when children leave school and are drawn to work or study in large cities. Lower incomes mean that older people have less resources to socialise. There’s cultural reasons too. Strong attachment between parent and child can lead to a sense of loss when young adults go to work or study. How we interact has changed, we visit and talk less on the phone and WhatsApp or message more. Lives are more busy, we consume more in greater amounts in our lives.

Social isolation didn’t arrive overnight. It is a product of a cultural and societal value shift over many decades. There’s lots of different forms of social isolation. How it impacts on one group can be different to how it impacts on another. Older age groups will have a wider set of life experiences and may be better able to address how to tackle isolation. My concern is about younger people being isolated.

Young people nowadays are under more pressure than when their parents were in the same age group.  Players drift away from GAA or sports clubs when they are 12. That’s a lot earlier than my day. Young people are not coping well with the highly competitive nature of society. Add to that the influence of social media, the instantaneous impact of posting, the speed and acceptance of social anger in daily discourse. It impacts on boys and girls in different ways and it adds stress on top of social isolation with inevitable consequences for mental health.  Parents may find themselves in the position that instead of being the first person to see something is not as it is, but the person who has to cope and play catch up.

That’s why I’m convinced  that when it comes to dealing with mental health issues, it is too late to be looking for a cure when you have an issue.   We tend to blame government for societal negatives and believe that solutions can be instant. It’s not the done thing to give a government a free pass at election time. But if it took decades to get to this stage in terms of the causes of isolation, it will take decades to get to a better place. That’s an awful prospect for our children and future generations.

Government have a role to play, sure, but so too have parents, schools, society, business  and how each of those components behave. Until such a time as all work together isolation will continue, young people will carry a burden and some of us will ask why and who benefits at the end of the day.

Closer to the next election than we think

You really got to wonder if there wasn’t a back drop of Brexit would there have been an election long ago and would Leo Varadkar still be Taoiseach? In Britain the right wing media lambast Varadkar for as they see it stalling their departure from Europe.

Many people in Ireland will give him a pass on this one as Britain is in disarray and Irish citizens are getting used  to playing the role of the parent in the room as departure date approaches. Many suspend their judgement personally on Dr V which is a mistake.

One way or another 2019 will see the Brexit question resolved.  Eventually we will get back to our domestic politics. And when you look a bit closer at Fine Gael, all is not as it seems.

5 years ago Labour got it on the neck during the 2014 local elections. Three ministers in particular wound up the electorate; Phil Hogan over the shambles in Irish Water, Alan Shatter for his handling of the Garda whistle blowers controversy and James Reilly for cutting back medical cards to child victims of cancer. There was a common thread that ran through the criticism, information was handled poorly making the electorate angry.

To plug the holes Dr Varadkar gave a large budget to his spin unit once elected Taoiseach in the hope of improving his image. Then the unit was scrapped and once more we’re back to obfuscation and deliberate confusion. Varadkar’s stock response on each occasion is to threaten a general election. At some stage that bluff will be called. It hasn’t yet. Firstly it was Frances Fitzgerald who jumped rather than see a general election one Christmas on account of information that was contested. Next it was Denis Naughten who was behind the doors about releasing information on the national broadband plan. The latest minister in trouble is Simon Harris and how the over runs on the National Childrens Hospital came about and who knew what. Lurking in the background are more questions about what the Department of Public Expenditure knew.

When there are question marks about transparency, political trust diminishes. That’s why we are slowly but surely heading towards a General Election. It may sooner than we think, once Brexit is out of the way.

Whether the outcome will give a clearer picture in terms of forming a new government is another question.

Let no man fix the boundary to a nation

It could only happen in Wexford. 3 months out from a local election and 5 months after the boundaries were set by a commission, some Wexford County Councillors are still not happy. They want the minister responsible to ignore his own commission and retain boundaries that have seen urban areas effectively managed by rural based councillors.

About 5 years ago Wexford Borough Council was abolished. We had about 6 months notice. Politics is a tough trade. Local politics is the toughest of the lot. Small margins here or there effectively decide the last seat and who wins. In rural areas it is parochial. Small communities like to have their local councillor. It really doesn’t matter which party they come from, if at all.

Rural communities understand county councils a lot better than urban areas. That’s what is behind this row. It has everything to do with prioritising small villages over large towns. When the borough council was abolished Wexford District was “compensated” by being allocate an extra council seat to ensure better representation. However when it came to the election in 2014, Wexford Town which had 4 outgoing county councillors ended up with the same number while candidates living in rural areas won 6 of the seats, doubling the rural representation in Wexford District.

Few would argue that it is in the interest of County Wexford that the urban areas are underrepresented. That precise number remains a secret because when the tricky matter of the new boundaries was put to councillors this week, they held their discussions in camera away from the media. Why they should do that remains a mystery. Were it not for Wexford Today, the goings on at the council would remain a secret.

By all accounts with the press out of the room, imaginations took off. It degenerated into Wexford’s own version of the Brexiteers. Magical thinking that the old days can come back if we hold out for a better deal. In fact councillors have already had submissions lodged and their amendments made to the proposals. This is apparently for some not enough

In the end they decided to ignore the entire report and its terms of reference which set out 5-7 seats per ward with small wards of 3-4 allowable on the basis of geography. Instead they asked that the status quo of 3 8 seaters and one 10 seater should remain! And if the minister doesn’t agree with that, they want to meet him to leave him in no doubt as to what he should do.

And to think that 5 years ago when the writing was on the wall for the Borough Council some of us were getting our political affairs in order before going before the electorate by putting down motions on local issues which would come up at the hustings. Weren’t we the fools?