Coverage of UK election was over the top

THANK God, the general election is the UK is over. I don’t know about you, but I was sick to the teeth of listening to our commentators rabbiting on and on about how the Conservatives were going to be annihilated, how Nigel Farage was the ‘new’ face of politics in the UK and it was a new dawn for the Labour Party over there.

Who cares? I could not believe that RTÉ ran an almost minute-by-minute commentary on the election count through the night and into the early morning, with presenters in Belfast and London.

I, for one, would have much preferred if RTÉ Radio 1 had stuck to Shay Byrne and his excellent Rising Time programme instead of giving us the ‘shock’ news that Liz Truss, one-time British prime minister, had lost her seat by a couple of hundred votes, or that Ian Paisley Junior had also been given the boot. Again, I say: who cares?

Don’t get me wrong – like practically everyone else in this country, I have English cousins. My late uncle emigrated to England in the 1950s where he met and married an Irish woman from Gorey. The couple had four children and, as youngsters, like thousands of other first generation Irish/English, they came ‘home’ to spend their summers with the rest of the gang, such as it was.

Over the years, some of those cousins, like thousands of others, maintained a connection with the old country and to this day still visit. In fact, one of my cousins was home only a couple of months ago with his family and grandchildren and will be back here next month for the wedding of my nephew.

So all is good on that front. However, apart from exploring the family connection and visiting tourist spots around the country, when it comes to knowing about our history, or even the make-up of our government, I bet your English cousins – like mine – would be hard pressed to even pronounce the word ‘taoiseach’, let alone know who that person was.

We, on the other hand, have had to listen to months and months of commentary by the media about how Keir Starmer, the new UK prime minister, will change all that is rotten in the UK. For those of you who have lived under a rock for the past six months or more, he is the leader of the Labour Party, who, along with an Irishman, developed a strategy to oust the Conservatives from power after more than a decade.

I know it is all-important for Ireland to have a good working relationship with our nearest trading partner and, God knows, in recent times they haven’t shown the slightest interest in helping us curb the number of asylum seekers crossing the Irish Sea and then getting on a train in Belfast to head south. We all know what Jacob Rees-Mogg’s thoughts were on that subject, so yes, there were no tears spilt when he lost his seat, but time will tell if we will see any change in attitude from the UK now that there has been a changing of the guard.

Remember, when he was looking to become leader of the Labour Party, Mr Starmer gave a number of commitments to his party. Some who reluctantly came on board at that time will say he has reneged on some, if not all, of those. Again, only time will tell if we’ll see any real change when it comes to handling that near-impossible problem of asylum seekers coming from the UK to Ireland, or, if they are returned to the UK, if the authorities there will be interested in dealing with the problem at all.

We also spent an inordinate amount of time commenting on the results of the election in Northern Ireland. Yes, that part of the country is a minefield and I always maintain it is impossible for anyone down South to fully understand what went on during the Troubles when we could sleep easy at night and not worry about being shot or bombed out of our homes, irrespective of what side we allegedly represented.

But the party that won the largest number of seats to the House of Commons doesn’t even go there, for reasons I understand – so why all the time and energy spent covering what is basically a non-event?

Our own TDs started their summer holidays on 11 July and will not return for another nine weeks – unless something extraordinary happens, which is highly unlikely.

I’m sure they deserve a break, even if many will tell you that they will be concentrating on constituency clinics and getting ready for a general election in this country. I, for one, couldn’t give a damn about that. I’m just looking forward to a break from all politics for a few weeks.