World of Politics with Harry McGee

It would be fatuous to say that if the posters weren’t up, you would not know there was an election. Of course, it is all over the radio, TV and newspapers – but, a little over a week from polling day, it just seems that the election campaign has not really taken off yet.

If we go back to the start of February 2020, we already had the rows over the RIC commemoration, the proposals to increase the pension age to 66, and the whole narrative about Mary Lou McDonald being ‘excluded’ from the leaders’ debate on RTÉ.

This time, there has been no major issue on which everybody has alighted.

At the start there was the silly row over silly comments made by Ireland’s great notice box Michael O’Leary.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael got involved in a phoney war with each erecting straw men in order to knock them down. The name of the game was to show they were different and both had separate policies.

Fine Gael did come under a bit of genuine pressure over the fact that it chose Senator John McGahon as a candidate in Louth, despite him being involved in an unsavoury street assault in Dundalk in 2018 (when a councillor).

McGahon was acquitted after a trial on criminal charges but found 65 per cent responsible when the case was litigated in the civil courts. Video footage of the fight emerged. So did a picture from the time of the injured party showing extensive bruising on his face. It was not a good look for McGahon – or Fine Gael.

All of the parties have now published their manifestos and they do offer a genuine choice, in terms of economic policies, as well as their policies on health and on housing. There’s no point in debating childcare: all parties have agreed that a lot of money needs to go into it.

Every manifesto has grandiose spending plans, using ‘billuns and billuns’ as Michael Noonan might say to essentially bribe the electorate. A billion euro extra for childcare. An extra €5 billion worth of tax cuts; €7 billion for retrofitting; a billion for disability. Tens of billions being pumped into health and into housing.

Of course, every manifesto has devised ways of spending every single cent of the Apple tax.

And being everybody’s friend. On Monday, presenter Katie Hannon asked all the leaders (including some very peripheral figures like Joan Collins and Michael Collins) if they would fight to retain Ireland’s exemption from the EU Nitrates directive.

Pictured: Micheál Martin in an exchange with Mary Lou McDonald, as Simon Harris waits to join in during the RTÉ Upfront with Katie Hannon Party Leaders’ debate live on RTÉ One on Monday.