Cock the vote
Friday, April 11th, 2008Young Fine Gael have just launched their poster campaign for the Lisbon Treaty and its vaguely risqué nature is causing quite a stir… well, not really, but a few people are talking about it.
Young Fine Gael’s press release on the campaign states that the organisation aims to “Excite Electorate on Lisbon Treaty” however as Damien points out, all they’re really doing is making the same mistakes as Rock The Vote Ireland.
The central error of Rock The Vote in last year’s election was that it failed to address [b]any[/b] of the issues at all, instead offering its viewers hollow talking points where the messenger took precedent over the message. So rather than have a discussion on the issues that mattered to young people, they had celebrities saying “rock the vote” to camera. As a result any discussion around the campaign focused on the celebrities they managed to attract rather than the point the celebrities were meekly trying to get across.
For Young Fine Gael the same distracted reaction is already happening - any talk around their campaign has not been about Lisbon’s merits or otherwise, it’s been about the way in which the youth group decided to campaign on Lisbon. The ads were obviously designed to generate a reaction under the assumption that all publicity is good publicity but instead the distraction created is clearly counter-productive to the intent behind the creation of the campaign in the first place.
The other main failing of Rock The Vote was in its inability to justify its message. When it told young people to go out and vote, the obvious retort was “why?”, to which the campaign could give no answer. When Young Fine Gael tells people to go out and vote yes to Lisbon, again the obvious retort is “why?” and it’s certainly not answered within the poster.
Shockingly, when you go to the press release you [b]still[/b] don’t get any real reason to vote for Lisbon.
In the press release, YFG President Barry Walsh states:
Young Fine Gael does not propose the young people of Ireland support this Treaty purely on the basis of past economic and social benefits to Ireland. Rather, we believe it should be supported because of the real potential it offers to further improve the prospects of the young people of Ireland and Europe. The benefits to young people are clear.
The release then goes onto list a number of the “clear” benefits to young people, many of which focus purely on the basis of past economic and social benefits to Ireland, such as the “Massive EU investment in Ireland” and “Opportunities to study and work abroad”.
The release promotes Lisbon as a way of giving people “Equality regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation”, “Environmental protection” and “The Euro”; which (like the two listed in the last paragraph) would all be valid arguments if a ‘No’ vote lead to Ireland being instantly kicked out of the EU. But it won’t.
Finally the list bizarrely includes benefits like “Food quality”, “Peace” and “End to the Roaming Charge Rip off”; the latter of which I’m sure Pat Phelan would be happy to chime in on.
So after seeing the poster campaign and reading the press release of an organisation actively campaigning for a particular outcome it’s still not possible to get an answer, complex or simple, as to why we should do what they say we should do. This is candy floss campaigning and pure attention seeking.
The fact is that on a vast topic like Lisbon, press releases and poster campaigns will do nothing to inform the people and (Old?) Fine Gael itself is organising local talks around the country to talk about the treaty in a constructive way. This is a good idea - Young Fine Gael’s hollow poster is not.
All of this enhances my view that the youth party movement in Ireland is the manifestation of political lip-service that needs to be completely overhauled or abolished. The intention of these parties should be to encourage real youth participation but instead they have become little more than a point of gestation for college students aiming for a career in politics. They preach to the choir and no-one else and they have failed miserably, just like Rock The Vote, to make any young person any more politically active or aware for reasons other than their own career enhancement.
If you don’t agree with the suggestion that youth parties are out of touch, just analyse the aforementioned campaign for one second. Putting aside the point that it went looking for the wrong kind of attention, the idea was to be controversial in order to get this attention. To do so they made a poster that is about as provocative as a Debenhams advert. I rest my case.
Blogs elsewhere
April 14th, 2008 at 4:18 am
[…] a feedreader or email. Thanks for visiting - Damien.I really like Adam’s post here on the Young Fine Gael’s attitude to their Lisbon campaign and those of Rock the […]
April 14th, 2008 at 8:24 am
To turn this on its head slightly but another way of looking at this might be that yoof political wings are viewed by many outside the converted as having marginal influence on events. So a cynical person might perhaps think the aim of the posters had nothing to do with Lisbon per se. After all, has anyone heard of the Ogra FF/SF or Labour Youth campaigns? Do they have even one? Does anyone know? For the record, I’m not a massive fan of the current YFG posters, I don’t think they’re awful, just not very good.
Posters are a funny medium at the best of times, and they tend to favour getting a negative message across. The Hello Divorce, Goodbye Daddy, and the Nice posters of You will lose jobs/power/money/your handbag are the best examples of the last while. For all the Labour isn’t working successful stories there are thousands of duds. And let us not to forget the instant classic that was Clifford T. Reid and
http://1.content.collegehumor.com/d1/ch6/9/9/collegehumor.4e148b6961d72b5ccb872c997cab1e46.jpg
April 14th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Spot on Adam, as someone about to leave the ranks of the yoof - pushing 35 - all I would ask is if YFG believe this to be the best way to speak to people under 25? I mean it is not as if they have sex on the brain all day, all night, 24/7 five days a week!?!
April 14th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
To be honest in UCD most of the parties were fairly mundane in their attempts to look “cool” and “edgy” and they were easy to ignore.
However as somebody who doesn’t blame every problem in Ireland on drink I was insulted by a member or YFG trying to get me to sign up with the offer of “free vodka party tonight”…
I am Irish, otherwise known as “alcohol zombie”… fuck off..
April 14th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
I would have preferred they just draw dicks on their own faces and shout yes… YFG reminds me of the UCD socities fair…
To be honest in UCD most of the parties were fairly mundane in their attempts to look “cool” and “edgy” and they were easy to ignore.
However as somebody who doesn’t blame every problem in Ireland on drink I was insulted by a member or YFG trying to get me to sign up with the offer of “free vodka party tonight”…
I am Irish, otherwise known as “alcohol zombie”… fuck off..
April 14th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
I’m a member of YFG and I don’t see how the poster does any harm. It actually gets people talking about Lisbon that otherwise might not.
As for the benefits - the treaty is about making the EU work more effectively by doing things like limiting the number of commissioners and rotating them between countries. It increases the number of areas where majority votes instead of unanimous votes are required. It creates a president of the European Council to make that body work more effectively.
The benefits of the EU listed in the press release can be maintained and expanded by a more effective EU.
And if it isn’t provocative, why is this blog post here?
April 14th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
@Dan - I see what you’re getting at, but wouldn’t that just mean the main justification for this campaign was to get attention? If so it’s still a case of the messenger being more important than the message.
@Joe - Well I do think it does some harm to the integrity of debate, although not very much. I completely disagree that it gets people talking about Lisbon; at best it gets people talking about YFG (and maybe that was the plan all along).
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t benefits to the treaty, by the way, just that this campaign and press release fails to highlight them. You’ve just proven that it’s quite possible to do so in a short and coherent paragraph, so why does the YFG press release resort to bullet-points which focus on benefits that are already there, or that would only be removed should Ireland leave the EU completely? I think suggesting that rejecting Lisbon means we don’t get to enjoy EU investment, equality and the euro verges on fear-based campaigning.
As for it being provocative - my point there was that the images were intended to provoke a reaction as a result of their sexual nature but are instead only provoking a reaction as a result of their absurdness in relation to a serious political debate.
This blog post is here to call into question the intention of YFG in undertaking this campaign as the reaction it provoked out of me was one of cynicism and bemusement - as well as the anger that I generally feel when political organisations completely miss their target in trying to attract the youth vote. Is that what the aim was? Is it a case, as I already suggested, of any reaction will do as long as YFG get one?
April 14th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
@Adam - I’m not suggesting that the main justification for this campaign by those involved in it was to get attention, rather that no one from outside the campaign got involved or “shouted stop” as some might say simply because they might have viewed that attention as being useful in the longer term. Again I’m not involved or privy to the campaign, despite what Damien likes to claim from time to time I’m much too past it to be a member of YFG.