‘Plastic’ politicians need to change their wasteful ways

Reflecting on the recent election, less is clearly going to have to be more! Although not when it comes to election posters in Northern Ireland, where it’s a case of the bigger the better.

I’ve watched the average size of posters increase over a few decades of chucking my preferences into the magical black box that decides who shall be my political voice.

Like many of us, I do not always choose well.

MEGA MARTINA: SF’s Ms Anderson took it to the max with posters bigger than Donald Trump’s ego

But that’s a side point. In future elections we seriously have to get a grip on poster-pox.

When I were a lad, every now and again our Daddy didn’t come home. For us kids, it was the highlight of our day to welcome back the man that put Nutty Krust, Cookstown sausages and Tayto crisps on our table.

Where’s Daddy?” we’d ask, plaintively. “He’s away voting,” our Ma would say.

No doubt he’d been inveigled into a trip to the polling booth by the teensy-weensy posters that barely tickled the lamp-posts in those days before the advent of plastic cable ties.

That innocent age of minimalism is over and today election posters and street furniture appear to have coalesced into a bland landscape where roads never end and elections always begin.

Posters went from mini to midi in the 80s and this trend gathered speed as the Anglo-Irish Agreement and Belfast Agreement followed.

Around this time we started to see “dual prints” – posters with the full election profile on one side (face, party, vote No 1), and the name of the candidate on the reverse.

This was designed to capture the attention of those walking in the opposite direction, or, perhaps, those driving the wrong way up one-way streets. A little nod, even, in the direction of folk who couldn’t buy into parties that didn’t understand the concept of reverse.

I’ve always been a sucker for the “diamond”, simply a square poster placed at a jaunty angle, rather like a cleverly-worn trilby. I’ll not necessarily vote for the candidate, but I’ll note the inherent playfulness implied by that zany orientation.

In this decade the size of the posters has become offensively large and recent polls showed that all parties – whatever their social-media profiles – still reckon that a mug on a lamp-post can be a clincher.

The 2019 local government and European elections took us to a new, wasteful nadir.

Sinn Féin, always leaders in electoral innovation, crossed a threshold in the EU campaign, and theirs was a vile offence against the environment.

Forget Arlene’s blood-red lines, the line SF crossed was in terms of size. The posters for Martina Anderson, that party’s MEP, went beyond the proverbial Pale.

Ms Anderson’s posters, at least those on show in West Belfast, were big. Not a little bit big, or a large bit big, but humungously and environmentally-damagingly big.

Martina gazed sweetly out from a poster that was bigger than a king-size bedspread. She was huge, blocking sight lines and occasionally allowing her gently-painted lips to obscure the traffic lights at the other side of the junction.

These posters of the ineffable Londonderry/Derry woman were so oversized that in many cases she flip-flopped (not politically, of course), when her upper half collapsed and she was left doing a bit of navel-gazing.

GOING FOR GOLD: Danny plays in Tullyvallen Silver, but missed out on Bronze in the EU elections

Having acquired, post-election (so I haven’t committed any crime!), a poster for the UUP’s Danny Kennedy, I decided to do a bit of measuring up. Danny came in at 1m 20cm x 61cm. Now, his posters were a little on the small side, not unlike his first-preference vote…

On the lamp-posts he barely measured up against the big-hitters of DUP and Alliance. Naomi was way bigger than Danny in terms of poster acreage. The TUV, however, often took a minimal approach in promoting the virtues of Jim Allister.

Occasionally, they deployed the “diamond”, which imbued their candidate with that aforementioned playfulness.

Green Party posters were disappointingly huge – and I say “disappointingly” because of the potential environmental damage that these oversized monstrosities cause. Posters are made from a horrible plastic “cardboard” that will probably still be hanging around when the dinosaurs return to take over the Earth after we’ve wrecked it.

Tyrannosaurus Rex 2.0 could well be left wondering whether his/her vote would better reside with Clare Bailey or Colum Eastwood. In times past, election posters were paper stuck onto hardboard. All biodegradable. Not so today.

Anyway, back to Mega Martina. Her street-pole flip-flopping could have been cured by more cable ties.

The problem is that, aprés-vote, these evergreen trees of cable ties retain a spiky nastiness ready to snare passing cyclists and pedestrians. Ill-used, they are way too able to “catch the voter’s eye”!

It’s time for change. Every politician, not just Mega Martina, has their part to play in the struggle … to rid our land of poster-pox and cable tie-itis. Our revenge will be fewer trips to ED (A&E in the days before Marie-Louise Connolly) for emergency eye surgery.

In my ideal eco-friendly election, posters would be knitted from out-of-date yoghurt and cable ties would be fashioned from unicorn horn shavings. But that’s unrealistic, so here are a few roughly-hewn suggestions which could be usefully refined by the Electoral Office:

  • a maximum poster size

  • cable ties colour-coded by party to ensure prompt removal

  • a poster density ratio

  • biodegradable or reusable posters

Candidates, of course, would in perpetuity retain the right to be as plastic as they have always been…


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