A Sign of the Times That Were

Nothing that we have seen in the country over the past decade has better encapsulated the excess of the 'Celtic Tiger' era than the debacle that ended late last week with an announcement from the Minister for the Environment.

Not the debacle of one-off, Southfork style faux mansions replete with plaster pillars that pollute our countryside like an epidemic of badly designed weeds, not the glut of 4x4's that will never stray off a suburban street or motorway, not builders metamorphising into developers before our very eyes like caterpillars on steroids.

No, it was the e-voting debacle and why, praytell, are we surprised? After all, the system was planned by the genius strategist that is Noel Dempsey, and was implemented by Martin Cullen with the panache and aplomb of a kamikaze pilot who returns from his mission unscathed and is shocked that his acheivement is not lauded.

The reason for the urgent need for e-voting that we were given by 'the powers that be' at the time are indeed illuminating. There were no worries that the paper and pencil system was in anyway untransparent, that there was a greater possibility of fraud or that the system was inherently expensive, time-consuming or unwieldy. There were no worries that the voting public did not understand the system or that changing it would simplify understanding of our proportional representation system. In short, there was no problem of any kind with the current system whatsoever that would be resolved with the introduction of these machines.

Quite the opposite in fact; the replacement system required the initial outlay of €51 million in purchasing the machines for the trial run and, typical of the cronyism and backhand nature of our current administration, deals were done with some of the party faithful to store these machines at great cost to the taxpayer. Some of these storage deals last longer than the supposed shelf-life of the machines themselves and without any break clauses. After all, why bother when it's only the taxpayer that is footing the bill?

Based on what was spent on the machines bought for the trial run, if the machines were to be rolled out across all constituencies we could expect the cost to the taxpayer to be well over a billion euro given the track record of this government with similar public projects.

And all for nothing. The system was less secure than the current system, as proven by investigations by security experts, was subject to viruses and was less transparent than the quite simple, effective alternative and was incredibly confusing to elderly voters. All this while being prohibitively expensive.

So why did Bertie Ahern argue so hard in favour of his government's desire to bring in these machines? Essentially the same reason that he argued for the replacement of the ridiculously expensive government jet, and the same reason that he oversaw the biggest increase in politicians wages in the history of the state; essentially it was a political case of 'keeping up with the Joneses.'

Defending the then unravelling seven year Odyssey into e-voting, Bertie Ahern said in in 2006:

“Our silly old system is outdated . . . we have to correct the software, which will cost €500,000, and then try to move forward. Otherwise we will go into the 21st century being the laughing stock with our stupid old pencils”.

The laughing stock of Europe indeed. If a teenager came home from school and told us that he needed a €51 million electronic alternative to his pen and pencil because of peer pressure we would tell him or her to grow up. In Ireland in 2006 however, we were too preoccupied with bread and circuses to worry that, not just at the gate, the barbarians were in fact in control of our Republic.

As it turns out Europe is now laughing at us for quite a different reason than Ahern envisaged, and the wasting of at least €51 million of taxpayers' money is merely one of a litany of disastorous follies, which includes PPARS, the shambolic privatisation of Eircom and a mountain of money spent on consultants, all perfect examples of what has been so very wrong with economic oversight in government halls for the last decade and how we have gone from (apparent) boom to bust in record time.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results." Let's hope that the Irish electorate will bear this in mind when it comes time to use their "stupid old pencils" again next election time and move us far away from the spectre of insanity that has overshadowed Ireland for the last ten years.

I'll leave the last word on voting machines to the good people over at The Onion: