“The drama, the character,
and the humour make The Battle of Baltinglass an entertaining story. But I keep
my copy of the book handy, not as a compelling narrative, but as a manual and
technical reference on the people part of politics.”
Except from: What’s So Funny?
Lessons from Canada’s Leacock Medal for Humour Writing
Though this Leacock Medal book is set in rural
Ireland in the early 1950s, I think, as my chapter opening above suggests, that
it is still relevant to twenty-first-century
politics despite the impact of Twitter,
tipping points, robocalls, and the viral Internet. It tells covers all the bases in the true story of a
local campaign that eventually toppled a national government.
A
mountain village in County Wiklow, Baltinglass was a quiet community where
people tended to mind their own business--until 1950. The appointment of a new
sub-postmaster that year shakes things up.
The
government grants the post office position to a young local with political
connections. Villagers see his appointment as an injustice to Helen Cooke. The
job had been in the Cooke family for eighty years.
Sympathy for Helen induces a movement to get
her reinstated. The crusade runs well over a year before culminating her return
to the post office. Meanwhile, a broader debate over political favoritism takes
hold around the Baltinglass events. It ultimately forces out the Minister of
Posts and Telegraphs and then the whole government.
The author Larry Earl, a New Brunswick-born
photographer and reporter, was working in Britain at the time. Baltinglass
appealed to his sense of humour as well as his journalist side. Today
political events move so fast, they’re hard to understand. But Baltinglass
provides readers with a way to study the chain reaction in slow motion.