Mayo View: An election with neither spark nor ideas

Boring, stale and predictable

by Caoimhín Rowland

If this campaign can be defined by anything, it’s a lack of ideas.

Pundits claim there’s been little spark, but what worries me most is that the brain drain seems to have already happened.

This island feels bored, stale, and predictable—bereft of imagination.

Perhaps it’s the dreary timing of a November election, but few are willing to rock the boat so close to Christmas.

As a nation, we’ve never been champions of bold thinking. Anything remotely outside the box is often met with a guffaw or a tut.

But amidst housing and health crises, all our political parties can offer is more public money thrown at creaking, foundational problems.

The result?

A society stuck in a bureaucratic malaise.

I’ve been covering elections since 2016, and the same issues from eight years ago are still the issues today.

Is it any wonder so many people leave these shores when delays, reports and problems drag on endlessly? Creativity and imagination are stifled here—smothered by bureaucracy, insurance hurdles, and red tape.

Take pyrite: it was a significant issue then and remains unresolved today.

Housing, once seen as a Dublin-centric crisis, was already deepening across the country in 2016.

And yet, here we are. The Western Rail Corridor pops up in every election manifesto, as does the Strategic Development Zone (SDZ) at Ireland West Airport Knock—a recurring kite flown at every election, alongside the usual tax-cut promises.

We have seen all parties throw the Apple tax money out with the bath water before it’s even been deposited into the national coffers. Creaking infrastructure persists across the country and the increasing HSE-ification of every facet of public life in Ireland will see more money wasted and a plethora of problems grow.

This is auction politics at its worst: short-term thinking with no foresight or optimism for younger generations.

These are the young people stuck living with their parents, holding good jobs but doom-scrolling at home, watching their peers thrive abroad.

Schemes to lure key workers back to Ireland—€5,000 relocation packages or tax credits—sound good on paper, but what about those who stayed?

The teachers, doctors, nurses, and tradespeople who toughed it out here? They’re left with little more than vague promises scribbled on the back of a cigarette box. Ireland is poorer for it.

For them, the prospects are grim.

Political parties seem more intent on pension double payments and €1,000 for imaginary children yet to exist, rather than addressing the reality of young adults stuck living month-to-month with no hope of independence. The average age of a first-time buyer is now 39.

Homeownership is plummeting, eroding the social fabric of this country. The housing crisis is no longer confined to urban Dublin; it’s affecting rural areas too, particularly our Gaeltacht's.

Other countries are showing what bold ideas can achieve.

Portugal, for example, recently announced a plan where workers aged 35 and under earning up to €28,000 pay no tax in their first year of work, with rates progressively increasing over the next decade.

It’s a dramatic, headline-grabbing policy aimed at boosting youth spending and stimulating the economy. And yet, such ideas gain little traction here.

Young people are the lifeblood of the economy.

Unlock their spending potential, and we’ll be better prepared to weather international shocks—such as Trump’s looming "America First" policies, which are expected to negatively impact Ireland.

The only vaguely new pledge I’ve seen this election is the promise to increase offshore wind capacity.

Mayo is poised to lead in this area, but grid upgrades face resistance from NIMBYism and pylon protests.

Offshore wind still isn’t advanced enough to withstand the wild Atlantic gales, relegating it to the "nice-to-have" category alongside the Western Rail Corridor and Knock Airport’s SDZ.

By the next election, we’ll likely abbreviate offshore wind proposals into acronyms—a handy way to consign them to the realm of unattainable dreams, due to their wordy nature and the amount of times the idea will be uttered and promised by our politicians.