Posters. A necessary evil?

Denis Naughten TD from Fine Gael has written to all prospective election candidates suggesting that nobody uses posters in the forthcoming General Election.

While this might sound like a great idea, its not one that I am particularly supportive of.

Election candidates use posters for a very simple reason. They work.

Nobody is quite sure why they work, but you can be quite sure that if they didn’t work, elections candidates wouldn’t use them.

They are particularly important for new candidates, as one of the primary challenges in any electoral campaign is letting the electorate know that you are a candidate. Posters are the cheapest way to do this.

This isn’t really a problem for sitting TDs, who have had 5 years to ensure that their name is well-known around the constituency, which is why the suggestion not to use posters generally comes from a sitting TD (eg Denis Naughten).

Posters are something of a blight on the landscape, but that’s more to do with the numbers of posters that are used rather than just the use of posters.

When used in moderation, they do serve an important role, in letting voters know about their electoral options, which is an important feature of any functioning democracy.

From that point of view, my own suggestion is that candidates agree to limit the use of posters to certain key road junctions, and to place no more than one poster at any location. The Council could facilitate this by placing poles at those junctions.

This would solve the problem of informing the electorate without dispoiling our scenic amenity.

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