Meathman's Diary: The view from afar, sipping from a coconut under the shade of a palm tree

Dara Mac Raghnaill

Not to brag, but this factor-50-smeared 36-year-old Meath man is writing this while sipping from a coconut under the shade of a palm tree on a pristine, tourist-free, white sandy beach in Southeast Asia. The coconut in question may or may not be topped up with rum from an old Jameson hip flask I received as a Secret Santa gift from one of my office jobs years ago.

How better to spend my Saturdays? Comments on a postcard, please.

But that’s where the bragging ends and the self-flagellation begins. As a Meath man who lived in London for six years and then did a Brexit of his own to relocate to Southeast Asia in February 2023, my ears pricked up hearing about the recent UK election results on LMFM.

So yes, I’m here under this palm tree in my 1998/99 Meath jersey, hearing all about the collapse of the Conservative and Unionist Party, which is music to my ears! The Tories have a lot to answer for! I spent six post-Brexit years trying to explain the nuances of Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement to English people and arguing with them that Irish people and our borders aren’t the ones standing in the way of their perceived utopian Brexit.

It’s the Tories, like a bull in a china shop, who have caused unnecessary drama to a Northern Ireland that, on the best of days, has enough drama to keep ITV’s daytime slot full for a while. Anyway, I’m a Meath man who’s (thankfully) 9,821 km away from Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Nigel Farage. But my YouTube algorithm doesn’t seem to care about that.

My feed is saturated with clips of the newly elected Nigel Farage (eighth time’s the charm). He’s informing me that he’s not done complaining. This time it's about the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system and how proportional representation (PR) is a much better system. Apparently, even broadcasters that oppose his views agree with Nigel on this point. Some are calling the recent election the “most disproportionate election in UK history.”

Nigel Farage said the electoral system was “unfair” after his Reform Party took 14.3 per cent of the popular vote – making it the third-biggest party by vote share – but won only five seats.

The Green Party received 6.8 per cent of the vote for its four seats. So, I’m now grinning, as any win Ireland has over England naturally cheers me up. Especially since they progressed to the Euros finals and piled into the very inauthentic Irish bars along the strip… far from my local, The Becks in Cushenstown!

Looking at our neighbours across the Atlantic, at the moment, the two-party system is proving that it’s on its last legs. But I’ll leave the US out of this for now…

So I better put down this rum coconut before I start slurring my words like Biden in his last debate.

Dara Mac Raghnaill is an entrepreneur, investor, content creator, Gaeilgeoir, and, most of all, a proud native of Meath. He holds a Bachelors of Business Studies from DCU and an MPhil from TCD. Living abroad since 2017, Dara compares and contrasts daily life abroad with his experiences growing up in County Meath.