COUNTY VIEW: Posters boys and girls

The elections are almost over, and within a couple of days the victors will be celebrating and the losers left to lick their wounds, wondering where it went wrong, and reflecting on the perfidy of voters and their false promises of support. It will also give us the chance to assess the potency of the (voluntary) poster ban, in whose favour it worked, and who it disadvantaged.

Election posters may be unsightly, gaudy, and an aesthetic eyesore, but this observer is still undecided on whether that is good enough reason to ban them. Election posters are an integral part of our democratic process, they are a reminder to the public that elections are afoot, and that we are being called on to exercise our duty to decide who is to govern us, locally or nationally, for the next five years.

Posters are one of the means by which political parties, and individuals, can get their message across. They are a guard against the indifference of the public to current events, they help prevent the growing apathy many feel to the mechanics of governance. Without them, election day would come and go under the radar of public engagement with many of us grown oblivious to a process which should be a duty as well as a right.

Tidy Towns activists, the most vocal of those opposed to election posters, are understandably concerned that their good work could be undermined by the unsightly proliferation of such blight on the urban streetscape. They point out that the elections take place just as the Tidy Towns adjudications get underway. It has been suggested that towns and villages have been penalised in the judging process for that very reason. If there is evidence to support that charge, then more blame on the adjudicators who are themselves under the remit of the Department of Rural and Community Development, the self same entity which oversaw the regulation of election postering in the first place.

Nobody can dispute that the visual intrusion of election postering is something not to be welcomed. On the other hand, it is part of what we are; their duration is short lived, and they contribute to the excitement of the voting process. Tidy towns and communities, and those who volunteer so generously to their advancement, are deserving of high praise, but neither is it the ideal that we strive for chocolate box replication of twee English country villages.

In the broader sense, election posters give new candidates a chance to build a profile and attain a recognition factor with the voting public. As it is, any outgoing councillor worth his or her salt starts off with a distinct advantage over the neophyte. To that end, it is noticeable that those who most favour the poster ban are the incumbents, who have enjoyed five years of media exposure, attending public events, and garnering media coverage .

It has been noted that, in a number of towns, some candidates (including those outgoing) have spurned the ban and have resorted to the old habit of personal postering. We will know soon whether they have been punished by the electorate for this breaking of ranks, but it is worth saying that not all voters subscribe to the anti-poster cause. (A neighbour of this scribe, a man who often rails against what he calls the nanny state, has pledged his first preference to whatever candidate was the first to erect a poster on a street in the town centre).

With another election not too far away, maybe now is the time to agree new guidelines. And if a total ban may be a bridge too far, perhaps the idea of a designated poster area, as suggested in these pages last week, might be the answer.