KEVIN MYERS AT LARGE: A certain steel enters the journalistic soul after a couple of weeks covering a general election. The humble hack who might have trouble crushing a housefly on Day 1 is capable of coldly beating a politician to death with a rolled-up manifesto after nearly three weeks of campaign-trailing.
Daily, we have heard the bar-room maundering of a drunk being turned into election promises. The drunk promises to end hospital waiting lists within two years, and so does Bertie Ahern. The drunk promises to create a society which produces no waste, and so do Fine Gael and the Greens. The drunk promises to eliminate traffic congestion by 2010, and so does Bertie Ahern. He even offers to abolish gravity, end sunspots and confine Halley's Comet to Bray Amusement Park, and so, too, does . . .
Enough. The election has become an auction between bloated bullfrogs on their lily pads. They do not dismantle and examine the croaking bids of their rivals, but simply exceed them in fat-lunged fatuity.
The result is a din of brainless belching bladders, rising in volume as the eleventh hour draws near.
If Opposition parties were in the least engaged and coherent, they would have tackled the Taoiseach ruthlessly for his two promises on hospitals and traffic congestion.
This is not quantum physics. How can any politician eliminate hospital waiting lists in two years, when it takes seven years to produce a hospital doctor and three years a nurse? How can he tackle traffic congestion in eight years, when the nowhere-near-completed Luas has taken a decade so far, and when we built under 100 miles of new road last year?
Yet maybe the Taoiseach has a point. If everyone drove in 95 m.p.h. cavalcades, as he does, traffic jams would be a thing of the past. At a stroke, carnage on our roads would have reduced dramatically the numbers of vehicles everywhere, eased traffic congestion in our towns, and freed up hospital beds from the nuisance of the injured (at 95 m.p.h. there are no survivors).
Moreover, numerous job opportunities for the unskilled would have been created in our graveyards.
Fine Gael has been no better, with its absurd, unworkable pledge to give free GP visits to all under-18s: unless, of course, GP stands not for General Practitioner, but for Garda Patrol. So every teenager who didn't feel like going to college or work today (oh Maaaa, my tummy hurts . . .) would be visited by a very solicitous Garda Patrol from Pearse Street, whose members would very gently take the teenage temperature, using their truncheons. Juvenile absenteeism would probably be abolished overnight.
Yet the most objectionable feature of this wretched campaign hasn't been the babble of witless promises from the lily pad, but the complete absence of any intellectual substance, central doctrine or moral consistency from the main parties. Election 2002 is simply Irish democracy, gravitas-lite. And three full days of this Toad of Toad Hall buffoonery remain, God help us.