Editorial: Polling Day, Election 2011

This could be one of the most important days of recent decades in Ireland. It might be the day that we, for once, vote with our heads instead of our traditions. Because it is only by working with our heads that we will get our country out of the mess it is currently in.

Perhaps it will be the day we, as a nation, throw aside the concept of our messenger to the Assembly being the man or woman we turn to in order to have potholes fixed, help us through the social welfare system, or to 'fix' something for us. Or worse, to 'swing' a piece of legislation that will make us individual profit.

The new Dail members won't have time for that. They have a country to fix, a nation's pride to repair, the staunching of a population's future haemorrhaging on the emigration planes. If they don't concentrate on these things, and these alone, then we might as well not bother electing them today.

But we must elect them, whoever we believe will do their best and whoever we believe to have the capacity to do what is needed. And each vote does count. Each single voice in millions of voices calling out for better things makes for a chorus, and then a roar, that much louder with a message impossible to ignore.

As much as our new generation of politicians have to change, so do we. We must learn to take responsibility for our own lives, to do rather than ask for things to be done, to build rather than expect things to be built for us, to create rather than always leave that to others. To do these things in whatever small or larger way each of us can.

In one way or another, this is the first day of our nation's future. Whatever the actual result in terms of members elected to the Dail, the really important one is how many of us actually vote today. If the turnout is as mediocre as it has been so many times in the past, then we will, as a people, have failed our sons and daughters who have to live, or leave here, over the coming decade.

For various reasons, mostly your editor's lack of time, the Diary hasn't run a political commentary during this campaign. But this piece is perhaps the most important set of words on Election 2011 that I can write.

Go out and vote today, or forever hold your peace about what has gone before, and what happens in the future. Go out, do your duty to our hopes and dreams, and be proud.

Brian Byrne.