Dublin
Ireland goes to the polls today. The Google Doodle is up, the shadow of history hovers with the 1916 centenary—and Ireland, caught between the two, stalls halfway through a political software update to becoming ‘Ireland Centenary Edition’.
Elections are heady things in Ireland these days, on the heels of last year’s Marriage Referendum which saw millennials and returning emigrants registering to vote in droves. Turnout reached 61 per cent last May. In the 2012 and 2013 referenda, it had been 33 and 39 respectively.
Ireland, the headquarters of Google and Facebook, has started to morph from the Charles Haughey-era politics of ‘Down with this Kind of Thing’ to a Hashtag Ireland, with #HomeToVote and #MarRef trending. But it’s happening imperfectly.
Irish politics remains dominated by a split based not on ideology, but on which side of the 1922-23 Civil War your great-grandparents fell on. If they were with Collins then, that makes you Fine Gael now.
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