Election expenses’ special: What price democracy?

Bradley Bytes – A sort of political column by Dara Bradley

They say if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. But when it comes to the  local election, we get monkeys no matter what the candidates pay-out for their campaigns.

Yes folks, it’s that time of the electoral cycle again, when a full breakdown of candidates’ local elections are made public.

And by ‘full’, of course, we don’t really mean full. Because, truth is, election candidates are only obliged to declare the amount they spend on expenses during the official election campaign.

So, everything that’s spent on advertising and leafleting prior to the official ‘off’ of the campaign is not declared. Often that’s when the big spend is made.

Shrewd candidates ‘front-load’ their advertising outlay before the official campaign starts. That means they don’t have to declare it.

This electioneering is disguised as something else, even though everyone knows it is blatant electioneering.

So even though the amount declared by all candidates in the three electoral wards in the city amounted to more than €120,000 in expenses, the ‘real’ figure – which we’ll never know – is likely to be far greater than that.

Potter’s pot of gold is gone in puff of smoke

€11.43 doesn’t sound like a whole pile of money. It’d probably get you two pints of beer and a packet of crisps in your favourite watering hole.

That’d be money well spent.

But forking out the equivalent of €11.43 for every single vote you receive in the local elections seems a bit steep.

That, folks, is the amount Niall ‘Harry Potter’ McNelis, spent on his election campaign.

His total declared outlay was just over €9,065 for the May campaign. That’s the highest spend of any of the 36 candidates who battled for 18 seats.

He won 793 first preference votes, which was enough to retain the seat.

Wouldn’t it be a great experiment the next time if Potter decided not to spend money on posters or leaflets and so on. But instead, he’d pay 793 voters a total of €11.43 each in return for their number one vote

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.