Remember David McWilliams’ “new elite”, the Pope’s Children? Ireland’s baby boomers, the pig-in-a-Python demographic bulge, the 605,000 Irish born between 1975 and 1983? They - and their younger friends - voted No by a whopping 2 to 1 margin.
McWilliams’ meditation on the 2004 European and local elections in that column was pretty prescient:
On June 11,many of them will not vote in either the local or European elections - not because they are apolitical but because local politicians say nothing to them.
Their politics is evident in their choice of books - they put Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and John Pilger in the top Ten best selling books in the country. Who says they have no politics?
Indeed. RTÉ, or the print media, or a consortium of European broadcasters, unbelievably, did not conduct an exit poll after Lisbon. So when people went looking for answers on Friday, all there was to hand was spin from Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein, Libertas, Fine Gael, the Commission, take your pick. So as Margot Wallstrom promised, the EU commissioned a poll to find out why people voted no.
The Indo’s Fionnan Sheehan has it, says it’s been “published”. But no mention on the Eurobarometer website, so no details on who did the polling, what the method was, all the things you’d need to know to know whether you could trust the poll — have they learned nothing about “trust me”?
So I can’t yet prove my hypothesis, which is this: The Pope’s Children turned up in greater numbers than ever to vote, and they were the decisive factor in tipping what would have been a close win for Yes to a moderately large defeat.
But I’ll keep at it - anybody have a link yet to the whole poll?
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2 responses so far ↓
1 The Secret Lisbon Poll (ctd) | Richard Delevan // Jun 19, 2008 at 4:18 pm
[...] The Pope’s Children Defeated Lisbon ← Ireland’s EU murky mandate in Chad [...]
2 Where is Fine Gael’s David Cameron? | Richard Delevan // Jun 27, 2008 at 1:37 pm
[...] role as Cameron has for the Tories. Somebody who can embody credible change, who can capture the disaffected Pope’s Children and start looking for ways to reshape the political and media terrain, then take advantage of [...]
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