Gerry 'The Monk' Hutch: criminals vs geeks, multinationals vs Ireland
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Looking at the statistics for Dublin Central, there are 7,000 more preference transfers to be distributed and Gerry 'the Monk' Hutch has a lead of 800 votes over the candidate in fifth place. If the Monk gets another 300 votes from the transfers, Sherlock, in fifth place, would need another 1,100 votes to overtake and displace the Monk.
A lot of people don't fill in the whole ballot paper so it is not clear if Sherlock can get enough transfers to catch up.
Why did over 3,000 people give their first vote to a criminal but only 27 people gave their first vote to a software engineer who attempts to answer today's most critical questions about social control media's impact on children and the rise of AI? With so many tech workers in Ireland, why didn't they rally around one of their own?
The question about tech worker votes is easier to answer with facts that can be checked. Quite simply, many of the tech workers are not Irish citizens. They are a combination of European citizens and people from Brazil, India and further afield. The European citizens, for example, from Poland or Spain, are entitled to vote in the European elections but they are not entitled to vote in the national elections. Many people from countries like Brazil or India come to Ireland on a student visa to complete a masters degree, they are living in estates like Citywest on the edge of the city and they end up working as contractors for some of the large multinationals. Some of them are employed directly while many are employed as contractors. This makes it much harder to estimate their role in the economy. For various reasons, including the time they lose commuting, the silos created by their employment, their social circles and the neighborhoods where they live, we don't see these people participating in the open source eco-system or other voluntary pursuits.
On the question of people voting for Gerry 'the Monk' Hutch, this was already hinted at in my previous blog. The Monk received an enormous amount of free publicity due to his criminal record. If I speak to friends from France or other countries, they all seem to know that there is a criminal in the Irish election. International awareness of the Monk's history seems to be far higher than awareness that more significant figures, like the leader of Australia's opposition party, is a former detective and the British Prime Minister is a former Director of the Crown Prosecution Service.
For any Irish police (Gardai) who find this infatuation with a gangster unpalatable, Australia has offered them asylum.
Every few hours, the election officials stand up on a stage and give people an update on the progress of vote counting. As the names of the candidates are read out, their supporters cheer. Each time the name "Hutch, Gerard" is announced, there is silence. Despite spending all Saturday afternoon at the count center, I could not identify one person affiliated with the Monk.
While nobody cheers for him, everybody has something to say about it. His strong performance sends a message. The voters' message is not exactly clear but it is disparaging for everybody else in the room. One interpretation of the message is that Irish voters couldn't tell the difference between a politican and a criminal. Perhaps some people are so unhappy that they think a criminal could do better than the status quo. Or maybe the 3,000 people who voted Monk are all about to leave for Australia or the US anyway and this was their idea of a prank.
Whichever interpretation you choose, I had the perception that many people in Ireland's political elite did feel both insulted and undervalued both from the pro-Monk media bias and the voters' verdict. For some of the other candidates, the thought of finishing on only 27 votes like me would have been more bearable than the fact that they polled lower than the 3,000 votes achieved by the Monk.
From the Monk to the poisoned chalice
About a week ago, I wrote my own observations on the likely impact when US multinationals shift their corporation tax back to the US. On Tuesday, an official from the incoming Trump administration confirmed Ireland is a specific target and on Wednesday, two days before voting, the Irish government admitted that even if only three of the top multinationals stop paying Irish tax, the state will lose ten billion euros in revenue.
Candidates spent three weeks on the campaign trail promising to spend money but in reality, they will have to cut expenditures almost immediately. The promises from the campaign, for example, the cross-party support for the Western rail link are still fresh in the minds of voters.
Given the potential tax revenue shortfalls were announced in the week of the vote, I feel this created a war-time voting mentality. When voters face great uncertainty from things far away, like Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and Donald Trump, the voters tend to prefer the status quo and the larger parties.
We can see this in practice in various ways: except for the Monk, the campaigns of other high profile independent candidates generally fizzled out at the ballot box. The same logic explains the decimation of the Greens party. The Greens were a member of the previous coalition, having a minister in the ruling government gave them a lot of publicity but now they have lost almost all their seats. The communist party may win more seats than the Greens. When the country-at-war or world-at-war mentality is at the forefront of voters' minds, they may simply see the eco-policies of the Greens as a luxury that can be put on hold for another five years until the next election.
Yet in this particular case, the crisis Ireland faces is a crisis of having all our eggs in one basket with the corporate tax revenues of multinationals from a single country, the USA. The two large center right parties that Ireland votes for have created that situation and they have been complacent in spending the money year in and year out without working to diversify income streams for the state. Gravitating to the large well-known center right parties feels like a contradiction because it is a reward to the parties who created the problem.
Ironically, the same multinationals in the tech sector who have provided this tax revenue pre-Trump are also responsible for the problems of social control media and fake news that have negatively impacted the very same election campaign.
Looking towards the future: tax will be optional, for some
Wouldn't it be nice if tax was optional?
In fact, such situations do arise and they are not necessarily good for the state.
When paying tax is optional, the very large tax payers can exert even more influence. For example, if a multinational has a choice of paying their taxes in one of three countries and all three countries provide a similar tax rate, the multinational may seek to influence each of those countries to 'win' the taxes. As an example, the countries competing for that revenue may be encouraged to become even more dependent on the multinationals by putting all the state IT infrastructure into cloud services provided by the same companies.
A different type of multinational, Philip Morris, has their international headquarters in Vaud, Switzerland. For some years, they chose to optionally pay the church taxes. At some point they simply changed their mind and stopped paying that tax. It was odd to hear church leaders complaining about the loss of revenue from a tobacco company.
If it comes to pass that Gerry Hutch is elected, will we see him lobbying for the legalization and taxation of any other substances on Irish territory? █