Election Time

The Local and European elections will be held in Ireland tomorrow. As you'd imagine, there are election posters everywhere and people canvasing all over the shop. I haven't been in Ireland during election time in years. What drew my attention was the multi-racial candidates on offer. In the past, all you could see were fat white fellas in crap suits with even dodgier heads on them. Now it's different. Although not foreign, a guy who in the same class as me in primary school is now a TD (member of parliament for our non-Irish readers). His father is Indian and his mother Irish. he's Irish himself and has grown up in the area. Now, we have a number of foreign nationals running for election. Some are independents, howver there are also a few on the tickets of the main parties. I took these pictures on the way to work today:


I don't know how well these guys will do against the locals. I can see 2 reasons why they might not succeed: 1 is that they are not locals so some may feel they might not know much about local affairs or culture. The second reason is good old-fashioned racism. Many won't vote for them simply because of the colour of their skin. We've come a long way but we've still a good distance to go yet.