From 2014:
Just reading the story about Michelle Byrne, an Irish mother of three children fined €150.00 for tearing up a flyer for Labour candidate Gerry Sheridan in frustration when he door-stepped her at her family home in Mullingar. Aside from the fact that Sheridan's an obvious buffoon with no concept of reality and a jumped-up view of his own self-importance, that his likes are allowed to door-step people at all is a disgrace.
Illustrated below is a photo of the standard public board erected by the local council in Helsinki for candidates to advertise themselves for the upcoming 2014 European Parliament elections. This is the only means by which candidates are allowed use materials to advertise themselves and their parties. Fly-posting and hiring privately owned bill-boards are not allowed, thereby cutting down on material waste and general eyesore. Door-stepping is almost unheard of in Helsinki. We all live in apartment blocks. In the countryside, houses are tens of miles apart.
That this poor woman has to pay a fine for essentially dismissing Sheridan gives the lie of the general attitude of Irish candidates: pompous, arrogant, self-inflatable, and absolutely shameless.
Keep that in mind when choosing where your vote goes - even if you choose to personally shove yours down Gerry Sheridan's throat.
The Finnish model is crystal clean. Being able to afford more campaign coverage doesn't mean you can. Elections are there for the people to make their own minds up which way they're voting (even if it doesn't matter shit) and every contender has limitations to how much they can throw at their chances of getting elected.
You may set up a speaking/interviewing point in town by applying for a temporary license, and if you get one then you can set up your stall at a designated place where you can address the public about your views. Candidates are NOT allowed to approach people. They can only engage with the public if a citizen wants to talk to them. They set up a stall, a small table usually with a flag to attract attention, and offer flyers to passers by. If there are piles of discarded flyers left without due diligence in cleaning them up for the bin, the candidate will be fined. They won't get a second chance either.
I've stopped to talk to several candidates over the years to discuss their views, and to state my own. The conversation lasts as long as the citizen cares it to, but the candidate may walk away if they choose. The citizen may stand there and continue to speak so long as there's no public disorder rules being flaunted. Like shouting and yelling, threatening, etc. If it's some drunken yob, it's the cops problem to remove them.
You most certainly CANNOT knock on private people's front doors to doorstep them: that'll see you arrested and removed.
You can't fly any posters or otherwise in any place not designated by the law, if you do you will be fined a large fixed penalty.
You can join in television debates, but only by invitation.
You can post videos online at your own expense.
The city erects hundreds of boards/panels like this one at busy points with large footfall, usually around busy junctions for traffic/people. You pay a fee, send in your printed materials, they're either passed or rejected (you cannot include personal views of any sort) and they're maintained by the city until the day of the election, then taken down in the dead of night. If you hang a cardboard poster or two onto a lamppost with cable ties, you will be fined and ordered to remove your materials at your own expense within a fixed time period, failure to do so will result in a larger fine.
The scale of the fines is akin to those issued to graffiti/taggers who are both fined and ordered to clean up the mess they made themselves and at their own expense. Usually hiring a power washer to remove their tags (
if they don't know/can't use one, a worker for the city will do it for you but you'll have to pay his fees as well). They'll also likely be given social community service of X number of hours, unpaid. Under age taggers will see their parents take the hit for their misdemeanors. In this light, responsibility goes back to the family unit. If your kids are little bastards, it's your own fault, deal with it.
These rules keep the city clean and fresh. Finland is a very thorough country when it comes to these things. Pro-actively too: the return/deposit scheme has been in effect here since the year dot. You rarely see discarded tins or bottles in public places. Kids or needy people grab them and get the deposit. If you're caught dumping you get fined a fixed penalty. This includes your picnic basket containers and wrappers.
These laws apply to all people equally, especially including political candidates - they have an onus to set a good example.
One time several years back, a local Green party candidate stuck an A3 sized paper flyer with her name, party, picture, and election number on the outer wall of the local supermarket shopping centre. I took a photo of it and posted it to one popular community site, pointing out that the green party member had stuck it to the wall using about two feet of duct-tape. Seriously. I made the point that a green party member being so fucking thick about the environment was hardly to their credit.
The community agreed.
By and large, people were both amused and angry at her explanation when she found out about it.
'I'm a mother of three kids, my husband works abroad and blah, blah, blah..'
So I engaged with her pointing out that not only were her three kids being set a lousy example, that if she was already overburdened with domestic affairs, then she was hardly a good candidate. The community agreed. She then said that she didn't have any regular sellotape or paste handy at the time. I made the point that she shouldn't have hung the flyer there in the first place - the law forbids it. The community agreed. She said she was very sorry things had gone this way and that it would never happen again. Both I and the community agreed.
She went out the same day and took her flyer(s) down.
On election day, she flopped: nobody in the community forgot her name or her bullshit.
Her election/advertising fees were left fully in her name to pay up afterwards.
Even little things like this make a huge difference on the national scale: it keeps the political class on their toes.
Like the state media minister who did a live TV interview in her lounge at home, a massive screen on the wall behind her. One intrepid journalist decided to check her television license fees and saw that she had none. Ever. So when she was busted they made her pay a large fine for all the missed years without a license stretching back to the age when she left the family home. Her party booted her out too, and when you're resigned, you may not enter politics again. You'll instead be reminded of your previous errors and told to fuck off.
Or you could do things the Irish way, right?
